


Lovve 8ites and So Do I

by subtropicalStenella



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestors, Bad People Having Good Sex, Black Romance, Bulges and Nooks, Canonical Character Death, Condesce/Dualscar, Dom/sub Undertones, F/F, F/M, HIC/Dualscar, Homestuck - Freeform, Masturbation, Mindfang/Dualscar - Freeform, Orphaner Dualscar/Spinneret Mindfang - Freeform, Pale Romance, Quadrant Confusion, Red Romance, Sexual Manipulation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-12
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:36:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2292095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtropicalStenella/pseuds/subtropicalStenella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You knew it wouldn’t last long from the very beginning. Just another fling to satisfy the requirements of drone season, more enthusiastically hated than usual for your similar trysts, perhaps. And then she became so much more, your beautiful, blue-eyed bitch. She’s nothing. A dalliance. A flirt. A lowblood whore. Gods, who are you kidding, the two of you are fucking <em>serendipitous</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ==>Be Orphaner Dualscar

**Author's Note:**

> Special Thanks to Hellhound_Of_London for beta-ing and putting up with my antics.

**⇒ Be Orphaner Dualscar**

Who the fuck is that?

**⇒ Be the arrogant seadwelling tool with a concussion**

“Who the _fuck_ is that?” Someone echoes.

Your head snaps to the side, towards your best guess at the source of the voice. You regret this, as now the entire universe seems to be rotating on its axis far faster than normal. It’s difficult to orient yourself with the bag over your head trapping your earfins down at weird angles and your codawful headache but you’re mostly sure the stairwell and door were to your immediate right, which now feels like somewhere-to-the-right-and-down. Your captors tighten their hold on your bound arms—like it would make a difference, you’re tied wrist-to-ankle and there’s four of them anyway but you appreciate the overkill—as you turn towards the sharp clack-thunk of someone walking down the stairs in…high-heeled boots?

“I distinctly recall jumping onto the railing at the bow, teeth bared, sword shining, coat flapping majestically and everything while shouting something. Now what was it…?”

The boots stop in front-ish of you. “Oh, right. That was it. _‘Slaughter them all! Take no prisoners!’_ and yet, here I am, looking at what appears to be a thoroughly bound, presumably gagged troll on his knees in my hold, so apparently soooooooomeone wasn’t paying attention.” The voice is female, sultry and rich and musical. It might almost be pleasant. You aren’t sure yet. She seems to overemphasize the letter ‘B’.

“Sorry, boss, but I had a hunch you’d like to keep this one.” The guard to your left—the pronghorned dark teal who clocked you upside the head with something heavy, from behind, no less—jostles your shoulder. She hardly sounds contrite, but she’s practically-greenblood-trash, not worth your time. None of them are. You ignore her and continue sawing your teeth through the filthy rag they’ve gagged you with.

“Well, let’s see… The jewelry says ‘Rob me, I’m filthy rich’…” Leather creaks and heavy fabric rustles as she leans closer. You start when she lifts one of the necklaces from your chest, weighing the pendant—one of the nicer sapphires, you think—and snaps the chain. You attempt to pull away but the room wheels sickeningly. “Left and behind a bit” is now definitively “up”. You decide to continue facing stoically ahead. Fucking hood.

“The clothes say, ‘No, really, I’m stupidly wealthy, I have poor taste and I make worse life choices, please take my money away.’ So that’s two qualifications for capture.” She steps back. Or possibly to the right. Or below you. You really want your equilibrium back. Also, ‘poor taste’?! Your boots are probably worth more than the collective stipends of half her crew, and does she realize how difficult it is to find a tailor that will work with lusus-skin?

The long, wet rasping sound of someone drawing steel is definitely in front of you, and you jerk wildly against your captors until someone else grabs at one of your horns through the hood and wrenches your head back so far you arch your spine with it. You hiss around the tattered gag, painfully aware of your exposed throat as something sharp—possibly a claw, probably the sword, tickles the dip in your collarbones below the hood.

You can’t help breathing harder as it delicately slides down your chest, leaving a thin bloodless scratch until it catches in your shirt. It hooks in, pulling the fabric away from your skin then continues smoothly through the thick silk, parting the threads like water to your belt. The blade whips away with a whistling flourish and the lackeys allow you to slump forward, though their hands catch the fabric over your shoulders, wrenching your now-ruined shirt back so it hangs around your waist and bound wrists, exposing your half-flared thoracic gills.

There is a delighted gasp from somewhere above you. “A seadweller? Oh, you _shouldn’t_ have.”

 _No, you really fuckin’ shouldn’t have,_ you think savagely, as the last threads of the gag part under your assault. You work the majority of the scraps clear of your teeth with your tongue and wait. The lilting mockery resolves your opinion of her voice into “decidedly unpleasant”. You are genuinely starting to get annoyed at these gutterbloods. You were already going to slaughter them all upon escape but now you might get creative about it.  
More creaking leather and the clack-thunk of her footsteps starts up again. Apparently she’s circling you. A needle-fine point drags across the back of your shoulders, left to right. Probably a claw, if the slow metallic scraping sound following her boots is the sword. She whistles softly.

“Look at _you,_ pretty boy. That’s three for three. _Such_ a lovely violet in those gills… and not a scratch on you... You _must_ be important.”

 _What is_ that _supposed to mean?_ Of course no one’s gotten close enough to touch you. It took fifteen of them to bring you down, and even then it was the fall from the wingbeast nest that did most of the damage. Did she miss the big fuck-off rifle her lackeys stole from you? You’re a sniper, you’re _Her_ sniper and you are damned good at your job, but if this bitch thinks you can’t deal damage up close she’s got another thing coming.

The needle point skates down to flicker over one of your opercula, the second one down below your shoulder blade, catching the edge slightly. You hiss and twitch away, it doesn’t hurt but it _itches_ and that’s important tissue under there—her claw hooks in, breaks the delicate skin beneath the edge and you freeze. She wouldn’t _dare._

She makes a pleased little humming sound, unhooks her claw and now there’s more needles stroking along your opercula, one finger to each, reaching through the curve of your bound arm to trace them front-to-back.

 _If she doesn’t remove her hands from your gills this second you will remove them from_ her. _Through the hood if you have to._ Trap her arm against your side on the next stroke, curl forward, and unhinge your jaws to snap her twitching itchy fingers off at the knuckle. You restrict your oxygenation to lungs-only, clamp your gills tightly down, so they won’t flare with your breath or in threat-display, no matter how tempting it is, you don’t want to give the game away.

“So _stoic,_ ” she coos, actually _coos,_ coming around-above-left-ish-front again. “Let’s get a look at you, shall we, Pretty?”

She yanks the hood off roughly and it catches on the tines of your earfins and a horn, throwing you completely off balance. You crash halfway into one of the lackeys, bilesack lurching as the entire world rotates and continues rotating up and to the right though you’re fairly sure you fell to the left.

You almost want the hood back. Everything is bright, bright, _bright,_ spinning like a maelstrom, you’re going to be sick and she’s there, _right there_ in front of you. A dusky blurred grey silhouette surrounded by black clouds with blue, blue, _blue_ too many blue spots—eyes? Eyes.—gives you a target before the room even slows down. You lunge for the pale slender column of her throat and pain explodes across your face with a sharp _crack_. The room changes direction—down and left and wobbling—and something catches and _tears_ sharply from brow to nose to cheek.

You taste salt in your mouth—you shredded the inside of your cheek against your teeth on impact—and sag in your captors’ arms, panting hard. You flex your jaw to realign your teeth with both sets of gills and fuck it, yes, earfins too, flared as wide as you can. It’s half shocked involuntary oxygenation reaction, half threat display. You stare fixedly at the ground between your knees, willing the room to stop _fucking spinning,_ blood— _your blood_ running down your face, spattering the floor from your half-open mouth. You can see her boots— _red_ boots oh fuck your cold life if you got caught by a rustblood you will _cull yourself_ —through your eyelashes. She’s crouched on her heels before you.

“Ruuuuuuuude. Thought you highblood bastards were supposed to be all fancy. Fancy manners, fancy clothes, fancy jewels. Isn’t that what makes you better than us? And yet here you are, trying to snap my head off and drooling blood on my deck when we haven’t even been introduced yet!” she clucks her tongue at you. You resolve to tear it out at the first opportunity. She doesn’t need a tongue to scream.

She curls her claws under your chin— _Did she miss the biting incident or is she just insane?_ —and lifts your head. “So, tell me. What’s your name, Pretty?”

She actually pulls scraps of rag from the corners of your mouth, but whips her hand away before you can bite again—not that you were planning too, or anything, that was totally a feint—and rests her elbows on her knees. You blink blood out of your eyes as you straighten your spine.

The boots are red leather and go halfway up her thighs over plain black trousers, but thank Lady Light, she’s not rust. She’s in a long blue—no, _cerulean_ -trimmed black frock coat with the top buttons and a keyhole neckline undone. A rich fall of creamy lace frames a massive teardrop sapphire—your sapphire, Light blast it—nestled in approximately three nautical miles of cleavage cod _damn_. And she’s noticed you looking.

You pointedly keep your gaze where it is—on the gem, damn it, you really liked the setting, is all, thirty-five carats easily and water-clear—for a beat before looking her in the eye. Eyes. One, two, threefourfivesixse— _fuck_. Way too many eyes. Apparently you found the Marquise after all.

Her smile is wide and bright and vicious, with a full upper lip and a gutterblood’s pitiful excuse for dentition, save for two long curving fangs that dent her bottom lip. She makes that happy hum again. Okay. So she knows that you happen to like a little extra anterior thoracic padding on a troll. So what. Lots of trolls do. Okay maybe not lots of trolls but as kinks go it’s pretty vanilla, nothing to write your lusus about. You are Orphaner Goddamn Ampora and you can still recover this.

You toss your head back, not enough to expose your throat again, just to flip your forelock out of your eyes—except, nope, that’s not happening. It’s glued to your forepan with your own _fucking_ blood. You are the biggest disaster. It’s you. Instead you sneer at her down the not inconsiderable length of your somehow-still-straight nose.

“My name is irrelevant. What should concern you is my _title_ , cerulean.” Like hell will you give her hers. “Drop the pet names. It’s ‘Orphaner’ or better yet, ‘my lord’, to you.”

“Is that so?” She smirks and stands up, brushing invisible dust off her trousers and leaving a thin streak of violet on one leg from her claws. She turns to one of the lackeys on your left, a big olive-blood, and straightens his collar.

“You were manning the cannons, weren’t you?” She’s almost purring at him.

The oaf swallows nervously. Is he blushing? What the hell? “Y-yes ma’am.”

“And did you know, when you gave the order to fire, that you would be bringing the wrath of the _entire Imperial Navy down on our heads?_ ” her voice rises into a somehow-still-musical shriek as she yanks him up by the collar. “Because _congratulations_ nooksniffer, we’ve just bulge-punched the _Empress’s fucking moiraiI._ Matesprit. _Whatever_.”

“N-no ma’am, I d-did—“ Wait, did she not actually realize who she was attacking?

“Oh shut up.” She throws him sideways to the ground, pinches the bridge of her nose and scowls at the teal. “Did _you_ know?”

She didn’t. She really didn’t. You’ve been tracking her for weeks and then you fall into her lap on accident.

“Yup.” The teal sounds smug. She’s going down first. You decide that you need to make her knees bend in both directions. “I also know that you’ve been bitching for the last perigree about being bored and needing a challenge. Sighted his flags and thought hey, here’s a challenge.” And her elbows.

“And one hell of a ransom… the Empress’s matesprit—moirail—flushedpale reacharound whatfuck—has to be worth _something_.” She taps a claw against her fangs _contemplatively_ and you have had _enough_. The ripsaw snarl that tears out of you startles everyone.

“ _Ransom?!_ Do you have _any_ idea who y—“ The room spins wildly again, there’s fresh blood on the big square-cut topaz on her hand and streaming down your face from a second gash and _fuck_ that was definitely your nose that went crunch and she hadn’t even _looked_ at you.

“There are _ladies_ talking, mind your manners,” she snaps, and a surge of pitch-black bile burns through you like Lady’s rain. Dignity be _damned,_ you are going to skin her alive with your _teeth._ You wrench your arms out of your captors’ hands, your shoulder dislocating with a sickening pop as you lunge again to sink your jaws into her thigh. She’s snarling curses as her idiot lackeys pummel you about the head and shoulders, yanking on your hair, your horns. You clamp down harder, rows and rows of razors slicing into her flesh made worse by their attempts to pull you off until she snatches your left earfin close to the root and _twists_.  
  
You go absolutely _blind_ with pain and vertigo, releasing her on an agonized gasp before your teeth snap shut on the tip of your tongue. Your vision slowly clears and she’s inches away from your face— _when the fuck did that happen_ —close enough that spatters of blue-violet dot her face like freckles with each hissing breath between your gritted teeth.

“Let me make this veeeeeeery clear.” You nearly pass out as she jerks your earfin again. You move your head with her before she rips the damned thing off, everything is spinning towards the hand against your head and it takes everything you have not to vomit from the tearing pain.

“I don’t _care_ who you are. I wasn’t even planning a raid today. I just happened to see your pretty little ship, think to myself ‘I bet it’s got a pretty little cargo’ and decide to take it for myself. It turns out, it did. Lucky me. Now, I have a pretty little hostage that I can exchange for lots and lots of money, if I were so inclined, but I think I have a better idea.”

She roughly releases you, shoving at your head and stands back with her feet spread, hips cocked and arms crossed so your sapphire is entirely lost. She smiles that painfully, beautifully vicious smile again and you have never wanted anything more than the ability to throw her against a wall and tear it off her face.

“Take him up on deck.”

The lackeys crow triumphantly. One takes a knife to the ropes tying your wrists to your ankles, the others drag you to your feet and your dislocated shoulder grinds horribly against its socket. They’re shoving you back and forth between them, one of them growls “Gonna whip some stripes into that pretty highblood hide of yours, _Orphaner_ ,” and you can barely stand with your legs numb as they haul you towards the stairs and they are _cheering._

“And release him. Overboard.”

Everyone stops.

“ _What?_ ” Much to your dismay, your incredulous question comes out at the exact same time and tone as that fucking teal’s.

The Marquise saunters past you and up the stairs. Light, even the way she walks is infuriating. This hip-swinging, I’m-sexy-and-I-know-it swagger that makes her coat flare dramatically even with a distinct limp. She stops at the top, and turns. Her silhouette blocks most of the blinding daylight streaming through the hatch, claws on her hips.

“Sorry, Pretty. I’d love to play with you more, but I’ve had a big day. What with blasting your ship to splinters… slaughtering your crew… setting fire to the wreckage… and sending the whole mess down to the Abyss…” she _casually_ ticks each atrocity off her fingers and you feel your vision go red. “As nice as that ransom would be, I just don’t have time for you,” she simpers. _Simpers_.

You’re three quarters of the way up the stairs after her in an instant, dragging all four lackeys behind you; you feel your other shoulder tear out of its socket but you don’t care and she’s laughing, bright and ringing like bells and that _fucking smile_ —she kicks you in the jaw and you go down in a snarling heap.

The lackeys catch up, the teal yanking you up by the hair as they haul you thrashing and snarling back up to your knees.

“What about the ransom?” the teal asks. You can barely hear through the blood and black bile pounding through you and the ragged roar of your own growl.

“Worth it.” She licks your blood off her ring and the sight hits you like a punch in the gut, a shot of pitch burns straight to your bulge and you have never hated someone this much. The thought stops you cold. You _can’t_ feel pitch for her. This _gutterblood_ , this _trash_ , this _barely cold spectrum landdwelling bitch_ playing at Queen of the Seas isn’t worthy of your _notice_ let alone your _hate_ and that only makes it _worse._

“We’re three hundred miles from anything, and you want to chuck him overboard?”

“He’s a seadweller. He’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, so he could also latch onto the hull and follow us or something or—“

She rolls her eyes so hard her head goes with it as she turns away. “So weight his legs and then throw him overboard, honestly, do I have to think of everything?” She waves casually over her shoulder at your incoherent roar as she strolls off, but someone has a vice grip on both your horns and now the teal is looking down at you, glassy-eyed and strange.

There’s a pointed, curling ‘M’ sparking blue-bright between her eyes, and the fangs are wrong but that—that’s the Marquise’s smile dancing on her lips. The teal cocks her head, smirks, and that’s the Marquise’s too.

“You’re kinda fun when you’re bitey.”

Something clocks you right at the base of your left horn and everything goes white.


	2. Orphaner Ampora ⇒  Have Typically Quadrant-Smearing Palejam with Royal Flushcrush/Morayeel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CRUELTUBE EXCLUSIVE: HURT/CoMFoRT GoLD FRoM THE RoYAL ‘RAILS W/ PAILS.  
> oRPHANER AMPoRA GETS PATCHED UP BY HIC HERSELF  
> MoIRAILLEGIANCE AS PINK AS oUR BELoVED EMPRESS' HEMoCHRoME  
> SUBSCRIBE NoW

**Orphaner Ampora ⇒  Have Typically Quadrant-Smearing Palejam with Royal Flushcrush/Morayeel**

Maybe _after_ you get your face patched up and you feel slightly less like death after swimming for three nights straight with dislocated shoulders and a surprising amount of blood loss?

A team of Imperial docterrotists has managed to resocket your shoulders, and while your nose had to be rebroken to straighten it, once the swelling goes down it should _stay_ straight. A carapace carefully hands you a glass of dark wine to wash sour bile-yellow blood from your palate as the mediculler who reset your nose is escorted, wailing and missing most of his hand, from your suite.

Another docterrorist takes the empty glass and begins inspecting your raw, rope-burned wrists. The dislocation of your shoulders had actually proved beneficial, enabling you to slip your weighted legs through your bound arms and ultimately chew through the ropes. Unfortunately a combination of water-soaked sailing line, pitch-black blind frenzy and your particular variety of saw-bladed dentition wreaked absolute havoc on your hands and wrists. He’s tying off the bandages for one arm when your lovely moirail sweeps into the room in a flurry of translucent silk, terrified docterrorists, physicianarchists and ringing gold bangles.

She’s gorgeous. Dripping gold from Her pretty bare feet and trim ankles, more wrapped around and around Her slender waist, neck, up and down Her smooth, graceful arms and wrists and horns.  Her decadent curves are framed in black and royal pink, fluttering silk draped over a sleeveless, strapless bodysuit held up by willpower alone. She’s a hurricane in motion, Her carefully wrapped silks and the waves of Her unbound hair fluttering around Her like the fins of some exotic, decorative fighting fish as She shoves rapidly scattering medicullers and carapaces out of Her way, tumbling them head over heels in Her haste to get to you.  Her delicate, lacy fins and elegant gills are spread high and wide, with a bright royal-pink furious blush on Her cheeks and She. is. _pissed_.

Shit.

Luckily for you, there is an event horizon for patheticness even your Royally Pissed flushcrush can’t resist and you’ve just passed it. Congratulations. You just stopped a Highblood Rampage by sheer force of your fucked-up face. You are the winner. It’s you.

On second thought maybe you should just let Her cull you and put you out of your misery.

Her exquisite hands fly to Her mouth on a horrified wail and suddenly She has your entire head buried in Her thoracic padding, stroking your horns and hair back with both hands.

Someone cull you now. Please. You would be in complete and utter soft, silken paradise if it weren’t for the fact that your face is _made of pain_. Your freshly broken nose is crushed against Her sternum, everything else is putting far too much pressure on the swollen, probably infected cuts that stripe your face like twin burning brands and as nice as Her hands feel on your scalp, a good bit of your hair had become stuck to your forepan, embedded in the soft, salt-crusted scabs and now you’re bleeding again, wonderful. Any  thoughts past you ever had of getting roughed up a bit and letting Her care for you have gone right out the window. Pale porn is filled with sawdust and lies, and you are an idiot.  Everything is ruined forever.

She’s babbling frantically, chirping like a distressed wingbeast as She lifts your head up to examine the damage more closely, grabbing blindly at bandages and salves and gauze and you’re doing everything you can to make Her stop panicking because panicking is _extremely painful_.

“Three nights, three glubbing nights and _nofin_ ’!” She glubs emphatically with Her cheeks puffed out and She’s prodding at your ragged wrists, applying something cold and sticky with more force than really seems necessary.

“Angelfish, sweetheart, please—ack!” You hiss when She drops your half-treated wrist in favor of grabbing your limp, aching earfin with both hands. She spreads it wide, stretching the tender, scratched membranes, a distasteful hiss of Her own echoing yours.

“No report, comlines _dead_ , couldn’t even—where’s the _glubbing_ plantfiber swabs you useless sink-ophantic lampreys?!” Someone pushes half a dozen into Her impatiently outstretched claws and She busily begins cleaning salt and Light knows what else out of the folds of your webbing, and behind the backs where that bitch had sunk her claws in— _oh fuck She just stuck a swap through the membrane you have a hole in a membrane that bitch pierced your_ ear _this is a disaster you are a disaster_ and the antiseptic burns through the entire fin like acid.

“Pupa, pup, easy—diamond-heart, I— _ow_ —”

“My _lusus_ found your shipwreck, you ab-sole-ute _basshole_.” She sticks half the swabs in Her teeth like sewing pins and talks around them as She fusses with your ears. “‘Mom, did you eat my morayeel?’ is not a fun conch-versation to _have_ , understrand?”

You start to apologize, but before you can do more than open your mouth She’s peeling your lips back, forcing your jaws to distend with Her fingers as She checks for missing or loosened teeth—which, yes, you had when you got kicked in the face but new ones have already moved into the front row, thank you very much, that’s the best part about shark teeth and this is making the split in your top lip open further can She not—

“And _sh—e_ couldn’t ev—en tell m—e what happened!”

Oh hell. The over-emphasized ‘--E’s are coming out. You’re fucked.

“ _I thought you w—er—e d—ead!_ ” At this She drops all first aid tools in favor of grabbing your head in Her claws in the single most painful way possible, fingers clamped over your earfins and shaking you.

“And I’m _fine!_ ” You yelp, grabbing Her wrists. Yes, yelp. At least you’re more than four hundred sweeps past your voice cracking, though with the way tonight is going you wouldn’t be surprised. You stroke your roughened palms over Her bright bangles, cover Her hands with yours, guiding Her fingers through your admittedly disgusting hair. The act has always seemed to soothe Her. You’re _not_ fine, you’re in the worst shape of your long life, but She needs you to _be_ fine. Her fins and frilled gills are flared bright and wide, Her lush, full lips keep twitching back to bare Her teeth, furious at you, at whatever She thinks hurt you, you don’t know but you want to make it better and you don’t even try to push Her hands against your horns, go you.

“I’m okay, angelfish, I’m right here.” Long, smooth strokes gradually straighten your hair as you chirr and click encouragingly for Her. You add a few trilled notes from an old, old red sea shanty as She eventually takes over the motions, finger-combing out tangles, crusted salt and blood and bits of stuck-in scab and Light knows what else. When Her fins start to relax a bit, you continue.

“All I need is a bit a patchin’ up and some sleep and then I’ll find her again and tear her a f— _fuck_!” There are now more claws digging into your head than you have _ever_ wanted to experience and Her fins are up again, good job, asshole.

“’ _H—er_?!’ A _troll_ did this?!” Shit, shit, _shit_. Talk fast before she scalps you. You close your hands over Hers as tightly as you dare, holding them in place.

“The Marquise! _The Marquise!_ You sent me after the Marquise!”

She stops, cocks Her head a bit. “And _sh—e_ did this?”

She lets you peel Her claws out of your scalp. Your head aches like She managed to get down to the bone and it takes everything you have not to go limp with relief.

“ _Yes_. I’m tryin’ ta tell you, diamondheart, I found her.” More or less. You fell ass-backwards into her lap but eh, who’s counting?

You rub your thumbs over Her knuckles, gaze up at her imploringly through your lashes and chirp softly. You gently tug on Her hands, leaning back into the pile of huge velveteen-and-silk cushions some quick-thinking slave delogged. It’s a decent pile. Rich soft fabrics and plush pillows cover your entire resting platform and tumble down to the floor. You pointedly ignore the fact that the whole pile is in shades of bright blue. Blue is not a color you want to think about right now.

“Sit wwith me, please?” You don’t suggest that She calm down or relax, you just purr coaxingly. In this state She’ll think you’re trying to boss Her around. You’ve never been able to say it properly. Part of your many failings as a moirail, part of why you don’t want to _be_ Her moirail, there’s too much red in your pale. Instead you just slowly draw Her down as you speak, until She gives one last exasperated glub and plops Herself sulkily into your lap. Knowing Her as you do, this is probably going to be problematic when She cheers up but for now you’ll attempt to ignore the distraction as She makes Herself comfortable, straddling your hips with Her legs stretched out behind you.

She heaves a huge, gusting sigh out Her thoracic gills, causing Her silks to flutter and Her hair to fluff out and over your legs in a heavy, glossy (twitching?) blanket. She’s pretty as a picture, albeit one of exasperated misery. Shoulders slumped, earfins drooping, hands held limply in yours with Her lower lip stuck out in a precious, perfect combination of a pout and a scowl. You duck your head a bit, trilling more of that old song softly as you look up at Her until She scrunches Her luscious mouth up to hide the edges of a smile. She reaches behind Herself, pulling great armfuls of the silken mass around the two of you until it’s nearly a pile of its own, enveloping you in Her intoxicating sugar-salt-and-spice scent.

Another, smaller sigh and She snaps Her fingers at a hovering mediculler.

“You. Get me somefin to fix his face.” She gently holds your chin with one hand, tilting your head from side to side to assess the damage, and scowls at you. It’s a mild scowl, though. “And you start talking.”

You wince as She begins cleaning crusted salt and blood out of your eyebrow with an antiseptic-soaked fluid absorption square, chirrup and jerk away when She scrubs too hard and a whole section of scab peels off in Her claws. She wraps Her legs around your back—completely around, Her toes are digging into your shoulder blade, what the hell— when you hiss in protest, keeping you from moving farther. She drops the absorption square in favor of picking at you with bare claws and makes a sound like a stepped-on mewbeast when you grab at Her hands again.

“You are _such_ a wriggler—” She slaps your hands away and pins them to the cushions. “If you leave the scabs all gross like this it’s gonna h-eel all _bumpy_.”  

She gives your hands a little _stay-there_ pat. You just close your eye against the blood dripping down into it and let Her work, because you lost control of your life the moment you found Her in the hatching caves.

“Wwe— _I_ underestimated her. Those rumors a mind control psionics? No joke.”

“Doesn’t explain how she got inside your firing range, your last report said you were ‘Three hundred miles from the middle of glubbing nowwhere, there is nofin’ here, this is bullshark’” She muses, rubbing at a particularly stubborn bit across the bridge of your nose. She picks bits of skin off Her claws, mops up some of the blood and throws the blood-and-slime soaked wad of squares over Her shoulder as you fist your claws into the cushions. She begins picking at your cheek with one hand, the other taking another handful of absorption pads from a mediculler. You grit your teeth and resist the urge to take the fingers off this one, too.

“I don’t _knoww_. That wwas right before daybreak. One minute I wwas asleep belowwdecks in my ‘cupe and the next, my helmsman is laughing fit to burst though the intercom and bringing us up broadside to this fuckoff huge galleon surrounded by half a fleet.” You might be whining a bit.

“She got your helmsman? I thought she haddock to mako eye conch-tact or somefin’.” More used absorption pads thrown, and She uses adhesive medical strips to hold new, dry absorption squares over your freshly opened, oozing cut. She turns your head to the side and begins working on the second one, making another distressed-mewbeast noise when the cracked scab reveals the pale white-violet of your cheekbone.

“I don’t knoww, but best I can tell she took control of the ship through its brain. She must have made it shut down the sensors, and either she has one shell of a range or she’s got someone boostin’ her. I shot it's stupid faulty thinkpan to paste before it could drop the anchors but at that point they were in grapnel range.”

“ _Now_ will you listen when I tell you to get a holistic interface? Let your helmsman whelk around wirelessly and next thing you know, some huge bitch starts making eyes at it and taking over. I kelp telling you, fewer troll parts means fewer _rebellious_ parts, but no, someone has to go _ambulatory_.”

You roll your eyes, flinch when She peels a long strip of scabbed skin off all at once down to your upper lip. “I’ve heard the ‘gold standard’ sales pitch, starshine. I know you like yours but I keep telling _you_ , I don’t want to wwaste the caegars on a full rig-out for a planet-bound bay skipper I mostly use for _joyriding_.” Also full helmscolumns creep you out. The familial resemblance is uncanny. Too many tentacles.

She grins, wrinkling Her nose at you as She cleans the last crusts of blood from the split angling over your mouth. “Awww… but he’s _sweet_. When he stops screaming, at least. We shoal-d get one for you too!”

“I’ll think about it,” you evade. The only thing that keeps your lip from curling into a snarl is the fact that She’s holding it. You are not jealous of a pissblood half-troll buried under a pile of tentacles. You are _not_. You content yourself with shredding the cushions under your claws and pretend it’s a pained spasm. It actually is part pained spasm but that’s irrelevant.

She knocks a proffered tray of flesh-sewing wires out of a docterrorist’s claws, snarling that they’d make the scarring worse _how stupid do you sniveling half-blind remoras get_ and swiping a handful of sealant grubs from another tray. She nips the head off one, pinches the torn edges at your cheekbone together and beings a smoothing a line of gluey secretions across your cheek.

“ _Anywway_ , I ran for the squeakcreaturelines and started taking potshots from the wwingbeastnest until someone got a lucky shot to the mast and toppled it and me onto the galleon’s deck. Next thing I know, I’m swwamped with gutterbloods, bound, gagged and getting dragged belowwdecks with a bag over my head.”

“Where she beat the shell out of you.”

You wince, half pain, half humiliation and She yips at you for messing up her glue line. She licks Her thumb, rubs the mistake away before it can dry and begins peeling the now wet absorption squares off the larger cut.

“I… yeah.” You don’t bother to spare your ego. What ego. You got your ass handed to you on a silver eating platform by someone two steps up from _green_. You’re a disgrace.

She pushes a drooping lock of hair off your forepan and you finger-comb the whole mess back again, holding it back for Her with your elbow stuck up awkwardly out of Her way while She bites the head off another sealant grub. Blood and Light knows what else oozes from your unbound wrist down your hand and arm. Your hair is truly a travesty and from the feel of it, this scar is going to fuck up the arch of your eyebrow. You won’t be coming out of the ablution block for a perigree.

“Afterwwards they dragged me up on deck again for a public wwhippin’, but I managed to get awway. Swwam hell bent for cured hoofbeast hide until I found those teals on a pleasure cruise, hijacked their yacht and here I am.”

You don’t tell Her you were released. _No one_ will know that you were released. No one will know what happened at all. If you have your way, everyone in this damned room will be culled immediately save for your lovely moirail. Then you’ll track the bitch who did this to you down and kill her and rip the spider-fangs out of her smile while she’s still screaming and the secret will die with her in a wash of bright blue warmth over your tongue and teeth you can almost still _taste_ —

You blink when your flushcrush gently shooshes you, patting at the crook of your horns with sticky hands. Apparently you were snarling. She croons as you smooth your expression and let Her finish sealing the laceration across your upper cheek and nose.

“Don’t you fret, cuttlefish. She’s never gonna hurt you again. I’ll krill her my-shell-f.”

What? _No_.

“Angelfish, it’s okay, I’ll take care of it.” You try to sound reassuring but it comes out half-growled. It’s nothing. That surge of protective rage was because you can’t risk your diamondheart on some jumped up gamblignant. She’s _yours_. Your diamondheart, that is. Of course. You don’t give a fish fart about the Marquise, you _don’t_ , but you’ll be damned if you don’t get payback for your face, your humiliation. A smug little voice chuckles in the back of your pan, rich and dark as ink over velvet, _Payback? You just want to get your teeth in her again._ No, you don’t. Not like that, it’s just that there wasn’t a lick of fear in any of those freakish cerulean spider-eyes and you want to put it there yourself.

Your beautiful Empress snorts, picking dried glue and filth off her claws. “Right, because that whelked out so whale the last tide.”

You swallow the hot surge of bile welling up in your thorax, drop your hand from your hair when she pulls on your elbow to poke at your raw wrist. “Dearheart, you’re the _Empress_. You don’t havve to go out and cull idiots yourself anymore—“

She shreds an absorption square in Her claws, suddenly furious, Her fins flaring. “What if I _want_ to?! Sh—e _hurt_ you. Sh—e’s knot _allowed_ to hurt you, you’re _my_ moray—e—el—!” She's glubbing furiously again as you bite back a growl of your own, do your best to turn it into a chirr, trill, something soothing and neutral but it’s nearly impossible through the flare of pitch in your bilesac. Not only did that arrogant blue bitch wreck your perigree, but also that of your flushcrush, and you can’t –won’t—risk your angelfish on a wild quackbeast chase when you have no idea what the quarry is capable of.

“All the more reason to let me handle it, diamondheart,” you rumble. You can’t seem to stop that sliver of a growl and She _snarls_ , bloody-violet claws kneading the air.

“No. Someone else has to do it. Knot you. _Knot you_.” She grabs your head in both hands, pressing Her forehead to yours and you feel the glue stretch warningly. “Sh—e’ll hurt you again, sh-e’ll take you _away_ from m-e and sh—e’ll _break_ you—”

You reach up carefully with your clean, bandaged hand and stroke Her heavy silken hair back soothingly. “She won’t, angelfish, she won’t…” _Unless you let her_. Wherever the hell _that_ thought and corresponding black thrill came from, it can stay there. You do not need this _bullshark_. “But those psionics, pupa, wwe can’t do this half-bassed anymore. Wwe need a strategy, wwe can’t just throww ‘someone’ at her randomly. You need an expert. You need me.”

She scowls and sharply raps Her forepan against yours. Her raised goggles click against your horns. “No. Knot you, but you’re right. No mistakes this tide.” She sits up, squints one eye shut and sights down an imaginary rifle. “One shot. PCHOOOOO. Right between the eyes, ten kilometers out. Sh—e’ll never lay fronds on you again.”

You smile, showing your teeth a bit in oddly sharp triumph, you’ve got her now. “That’s a shell of a shot,” you muse.

“Easy, for my snipers,” she announces smugly, tipping her chin up.

“A course. Still, with a target like this, you can’t just send anyone.”

She nods sagely. “Of course not, I’d send my very _best_ one.”

“Reel-y? Your vvvery best one?” You throw an extra warble into your voice as your smile widens to a half-feral grin. Her eyes narrow as you twine your arms around Her waist, cuddling Her as close as you dare. You can see Her fighting back a smile through Her scowl because as much as She hates the idea of sending you, if She wants the best, She _has_ to send you and She knows it.

“Your vvvvvvvery best one?” The smile wins and She actually _giggles_ at your exaggerated warble. “And wwho might that be?”

She sighs resignedly out Her gills and drapes Her arms around your shoulders, smiling fondly. “It’s you.”

For a moment there you thought you might actually have to _shoosh_ your flushcrush. If there’s one thing that will change Her mind it’s clever wording and a bit of homicidal nostalgia. Play your cards right and you might manage to calm Her down _and_ get to kill the bitch that started this whole disaster. Now to cheer your diamondheart up, and make Her _want_ to send you.

“I can track her down again and kill her for us both.” You pause when She hums Her reluctant approval before quirking your glue-stiff eyebrow contemplatively. “But, of course, if you’re going to send _me_ , a quick shot to the head seems like a wwaste…”

“Oh reely?”  She tilts Her head and squints skeptically.

“Yes, reely. It’s not like you.” You squeeze your arms around Her, pulling Her belly tight against your bare chest. You could rest your chin on Her padding, press your lips to the swell of Her cleavage, but you don’t because you’re actually capable of restraint. Sometimes. “Remember the last one you sent me after?”

Her eyes light up at the memory and She smiles with all Her teeth. “The ambassadestroyer.”

“That’s right,” you purr. “The one that wanted to build his consulate hive right on your favorite water-barkbeast beach.”

“It’s where they go to have their babies. If he put his em-bass-y there, the pretty black and white seawolves wouldn’t have any baby water-barkbeasts to play ball with! They make the best squeaktoys and they’re delicious.”   

“That they are.” You smile indulgently up at Her as She plays with the cowlick at your nape. “But he wouldn’t listen, would he? So what did you have me do?”

She bites Her bottom lip, tosses Her hair back, sweet and coy and infinitely sexual all at once. Her hands are deliciously cool and soft against your upper gill slits as Her fingers stroke across the back of your neck. “I had you shoot him.”

You mock-scowl up at her.  “Just ‘shoot’ him? Starshine, you inspired executionary art.”

She smiles, laces Her claws behind your head and squirms in your lap like a wriggler with a secret. Yeah, that’s going to become a problem _really_ soon. “Did I?”

“You told him to draww up the plans, brought him out to that beach with a full team a survvoyeurs, and let them shoo a couple hundred seals awway. They set up their little construction markers for three hours, and then on your signal I put twwenty-four bolts into his back from a cliff eight kilometers dowwnwwind.”

Her tongue curls out over the tip of a fang as She looks down on you through hooded eyes. “Why so many?”

You tap your fingers up Her spine, bone by bone. “Because _you_ , swweetheart, told me to put a bolt into each and every one a his vvertebrae before he could hit the ground, _after_ the first shot to the base a his thoracic support column. Not enough to cull him outright, a course, because you _also_ told me that you wanted to see him drag himself across the beach like a wwater-barkbeast, since he liked them so much.”

“And then…?”

“And then you made his owwn construction crew tie him up in foundation marking cord and throw him to the seawwolvves.”

She smiles like a bitefish and begins petting your bare shoulders, trailing Her claws along your collarbones. “Remember the caterror?”

You purr louder at Her touch, tip your head back so She can run Her fingers down the sensitive length of your throat, trusting that she’ll be gentle with your gills--unlike _some_ trolls. “The one who had the business cards with ‘Wwhatevver the Shell Her Name Wwas, Official Caterror to’ written bigger and fancier than ‘Her Imperious Condescension’?”

“I was thinking the one from the Twelfth Perigrees’ Shellebration a few sweeps ago, with the color-themed entrees?”

“ _That_ guy. How the shell did he evven think he’d pull off _calamari_ at your Twelfth Perigree’s Ball? ‘Happy Obligatory Gift-Giving Solstice Night, here’s an oinkbeastfisted blackflirt slash statement of rebellion by way of your distant-cousin-by-lusus chopped up and fried on a platter’?”

“With _strawberry_ sauce, no less.”

“I _knoww_. Wwhich, admittedly, _wwas_ good. Almost a wwaste that you served him his own brass shameglobes with it.”

“I reel-y shoal-d have gotten the recipe.”

“And are you _shore_ you just wwant me to off the Marquise with a quick, clean headshot?”

“You got a betta idea?” She smiles fondly, sweetly down at you, because of course you have ideas.

You take one of Her hands in yours, leaving the other pressed into the small of Her back, and kiss Her bloody palm.

“Wwell, you seem determined to sea to it she nevver lays fronds on me again. I could mako that happen,” you croon, turning up the charm.

It won’t work on Her, of course, but you know you have a sexy voice and a silver tongue. General consensus and the tabloids agree: you could read drone diagnostic reports into a staticky intercom and still cause mass pants-dampening, something your lovely moirail finds amusing if nothing else and that’s good enough for you.

You press a kiss to each of Her fingertips, soft but lingering, and resist the urge to pull Her fingers into your mouth to do more. That’s usually pushing too far, but She doesn’t stop you when your lips part and you lap a smear of your blood from Her webbing, because that’s the game, isn’t it? You dance on the edge of red and pale with a desperate hunger for Her every touch that seems to linger too long, too intimately to be truly pale, promising more if only you could please Her, give Her what she wants. It pleases Her to watch you dance that ever-shifting line blindfolded. She wants you unbalanced, the risk and reward and punishment blurring together until all you know is falling for Her.

And if you get off on it, well, that’s _your_ damage.

“I could play target practice again,” you purr. It comes out harsher than normal, still raspy with pitch. “Ten movin’ fingers wwould be a damn sight more a challenge than a thoracic support column.”

You hear the telltale _whirrrrr-_ CLICK of a camera lens, probably a bionic eye, and suppress an irritated groan. Of course. You’re in a good mood, She’s in a good mood, and so the puparazzi think it’s safe to risk a couple shots. Sneaking someone in as a mediculler is new, though. Her sudden bright smile says She heard it too, and She spreads Her hand wide, stretching the translucent webbing between Her violet-coated fingers. There’s a hard, hot thrill from the pit of your stomach, and your nook throbs at the sight of your violet on Her lovely hands, though you don’t know if you see it as blood or slurry.

You’re struck with the sudden realization that She can’t wear rings, not anymore, not since the Royal webbing grew in between Her fingers from knuckles to fingertips. You still can, towards the ends of your fingers, with your short violetblood half-webbing, and you can’t shake the image of your blood on bright jewels, on a garish square-cut topaz sparkling in blazing, burning sunlight.  

The camera click-whirrs over to video, drawing you back. You turn Her hand slightly, angle your head just so, and draw your long tongue up from Her wrist, over Her palm, wrapping the tip around Her middle claw with a little curling flourish.

There. That should make the little puparazzo’s career, short lived though it’ll be, after the video goes viral. You can practically see the CruelTube commentary already. Pages and pages of shrieking, overexcited idiots, (half of them claiming the video to be fake, no doubt) to eventually be topped by your lovely moirail’s gloating capslock.

S)(--ELL Y--EA)( IT’S R-E-EL, AND )(-E CAN DO T)(AT WIT)(  )(IS BULG-----E TOO 38D

Or something, because one, you can in fact do that with your bulge (not that She’d let you) and two, She can never resist pimping you out, showing you off, and then culling anyone who dares intrude on your time together.

She switches hands, and you press more adoring, deliberately sensual kisses along Her fingers, slowly licking your violet off. It’s ceased to be blood, in your mind, and She’s pressed hard enough into your lap that She can probably feel your bulge pulse and stir in its sheathe. She shakes some of Her hair back, exposing the sleekly muscled plane of your bare stomach and the bright edges of your thoracic opercula, though they clench tightly closed at the sudden unwanted chill. Your gills are once again on display, and some perverse urge compels you to take the tip of Her finger between your teeth with utmost gentleness, though you bare most of of your teeth at the phantom itch along your opercula.

She smiles slowly back at you, running Her lightly dented fingertip along your bottom lip, and you can almost hear something like a genuine purr in Her voice.

“And after, when I commission your new ship, she can be your new figurehead.”

You swallow hard as She spreads Her arms wide to demonstrate, arching Her back, presenting Her bloodstained breast to you. It could be the almost-purr, or slow, self-satisfied roll of Her hips against your crotch as She arcs gracefully back that has you suddenly soaking through your trousers.

The crushed-velvet-and-smoke voice in the back of your mind says it’s the thought of pinning what’s left of that blue bitch to your bow like a bug on display and letting her _rot_.

Your arms tighten around your sweetheart’s waist and this time you do kiss Her breasts. She laughs softly at your enthusiasm, and you realize you had growled that last thought aloud with dried blood and salt and cool—too cool—soft skin on your tongue. You can feel the heavy benthic pulse of Her bloodpusher under your lips. Your fingers clench into hooked claws beneath Her hair, aching to wrench the top of Her wetsuit down, to leave nothing but bare skin between your lips, your tongue, your teeth and a bloodpump that always beats too slow, never sparking faster with adrenaline or excitement or lust, it should be as fast as your own, no, _faster_ , a racing drumbeat just shy of a lowblood’s vibrato thrum-- _where the fuck did that come from_

“Have I 'inspired' you, my Orphaner?” She lilts, and the noise that comes out of you should be impossible, this hungry, pleading affirmative, a heavy rolling growl that comes pouring from your chest to spiral up, fluting through your sinuses against the calcium support struts of Her chest as Her manicured clawtips trail along your jaw.

“Have _I_ inspired you, _my_ Orphaner?” She asks again, and dimly through the haze of red-black-love-lust-pitch-pale bright burning _hunger_ you realize the emphasis is important as Her fingers clamp tight around your chin, under your heavily bruised jaw and She wrenches your head up one-handed.

She digs Her fingers into your cheeks, forcing your mouth to open against Hers.  It’s not a kiss so much as an assault, Her tongue thrusting into your mouth like She’s laying claim to you with Her soft full lips pulled back from Her teeth but your bulge unsheathes all at once anyway, straining against your ruined trousers.

You know better than to kiss Her back, but the need rips through you stronger than it ever has until Her tongue tears itself open on your back teeth--salt cold syrup in your mouth where once was sweet warmth that burned you to your black twisted core--and _repulses_ you.

She pulls away, shoving you flat into the cushions, sneering.

“You taste of _pitch_ when you speak of her.”

You sprawl heedlessly beneath Her, panting raggedly around the rumble of your constant fluting growl. Your gills and fins are spread wide, you don’t even know why. Threat response, need for oxygen, arousal, anything, all of it.

“She’s n-nothin’ I swwear, a dalliance, a f-flirt, a lowwblood wwhore,” you babble, pushing yourself on one elbow, reaching for your love, needing Her touch, any touch and that damned voice in your head begins to laugh. It sounds familiar. “Nothin’ to me, diamondheart, you’re my everythin’. Please—Don’t—Angelfish, I _need_ you!”   

Your lovely moirail ignores your plaintive hands and shoves Herself to Her feet in a swirl of silk, planting one foot on your sternum, forcing you back down and brushing bits of you off Her wetsuit. She stares haughtily down at you, spread sloppy and desperate and _aching_ on a borrowed pile of blue—face it, _cerulean_ —silk and velvet cushions. You can’t stand that look, remote and cold, imperious and condescending in all Her glory, but at the same time you crave it, that possessive glint in Her eyes that says She _owns_ you, you’re _Hers_ , one way or another.

“Good. Sea to it that it stays that ray.” She turns on the nearest mediculler, impassive to their collective terrified gasp as they flinch away from Her as one. “Fix him.”

And then She leaves you with nothing but the sound of your own labored breathing in the echoing silence of your suite.

You flop bonelessly back into the cushions, claws fisted into your hair between your horns, eyes closed, brow furrowed, arms up and around your aching head. A rustling off to your side indicates the approach of one of those damned physicianarchists. Your bloody, as yet untreated hand snaps out to the side, seizing him across the face, more chance than planning.

You take deep, slow breaths as he squirms in your hand, weeping, sniveling, too terrified to protest, to try and free himself. One of the ones that likes to think, “If I don’t move, he can’t see me!” Another—well out of arm’s reach, this one—stammers apologies.There’s another collective flinch as your eyes snap open and you stare blindly at the ceiling.

“Get. Out.” It rolls out on the deepest growl you’ve ever produced, resonating through your bones, tearing through your chest and throat, echoing off your open gillslits as a fresh wave of black bile burns through you, inexorable as the tide and it feels _incredible_.

A whimper, from the lampreys, none of whom have moved. “S-sir, the Empress…”

“The _Empress_ wwill only have you culled for disobeying her if she remembers you exist.” You would almost sound calm, if not for the ceaseless freighter-engine roar in your chest. You speak slowly, using small words, as if to especially stupid wrigglers. “If you run noww, as fast and as far as you can, you might have a few hours; nights evven, to get your affairs in order. You might evven get to see your clades again, depending on howw skilled your pursuers are.”

“I, howwevver, will personally shove my entire fist down your throat—” The physcianarchist shrieks as your thumbclaw sinks into his eye with a faint pop, splattering  rusty orange vitreous fluid over your hand, “—tear your bloodpump up through your windtube, out a your thorax, and leavve it, still beating, in your mouth if you’re not out a this room in the next second.”

They fall all over themselves in their haste to escape, some of them even daring to pull their fellow physicianarchist out of your grip.

You let them, and scrub your claws off on a lushly woven throw as the door slams behind the last one. For a moment, you don’t move. You just lay there breathing, cataloging the bone-deep exhausted ache throughout your body, the dull pain in your shoulders, the still-sharp fire from the cuts in your face and hands, and the persistent throbbing of your frustrated sexual organs, almost savoring it, wondering if you’ll be able to smother the black fire in your core in soft, cool red. You pull another woven plane over your face, breathing deeply, all but drowning in the sweet-spice scent of your flushcrush but it’s _cloying_ , sickly, it even _smells_ cold.

You toss it away, drop one resigned hand to your stomach, scrape your claws roughly down and cup yourself through your trousers.

Light, what is _wrong_ with you, you’re buried in a pile that just hosted the palest scene of your life. You rock into your hand, slow and easy, swivelling your hips, the motion shifting the cushions and surrounding you with the scent of the woman you want for your red quadrant more than you want to live sometimes, but you can’t stop thinking about the bitch who put you here.

You rake your claws over the side of your head and your bandaged hand brushes against your aching earfin. Raining _hell_ , you knew they were sensitive, how could you not, but _fuck_ , she snapped you out of a damned frenzy with one hand. She’s a _landdweller,_ inferior to you in every way and she didn’t _care_. She took you on as a blind challenge, a thrill, and when you proved more than she expected she took you head on just to spite her own foolish arrogance. Your hemocaste, political connections and wealth became something she could use against you. Your gills, your fins, even your jewelry went from status symbols to little more than targets to exploit.

You’re used to people using you, your wealth, your status to further their own gains, but _against_ you? She took immediate advantage of everything that makes you better than her,  traits that enable you to survive and thrive where every fucking _landweller_ fears in the most primal way, a world that means terrible, choking death to _every last one of them_ \--using it to literally bring you to your knees, and all the while telling you you’re nothing but a lucky break with her hands painted violet, threatening to tear half your fin off with your blood and hers mingling obscenely in your mouth. You push the heel of your hand against the base of your fin and get a little echo of the terrifying vertigo she inflicted on you that has you tearing your trousers open and down one handed.

You’re shoving three fingers into your nook before you can even think about it, you’ve long since blunted the claws on one hand for this exact reason, most trolls do, but not her. No, she’s too proud of those long fucking needles on the tips of her fingers, fucking sadist, fucking _bitch_ , you can almost still feel them scratching over your gillcovers and the implied threat therein, you’d have to rip them off her yourself before you let her get anywhere near your nook, and the thought has you bucking against your own hand with a strangled whine with your bulge thrashing against your stomach.

Bright blue pouring down from the bite in her thigh, swaggering away from you on legs for days and fuck-me heels, just out of reach with that bright vicious cocky fucking come-and-get-me smile you’ll tear off her face with those impossibly long legs wrapped around your shoulders. You curl your fingers inside your nook, twisting them roughly, and grind the heel of your free hand harder against your earfin, needing more pressure-pain-turned-pleasure, wanting her knees tight around your head, fucking up your equilibrium and her strong sword-callused hands around your horns as you _wreck_ her, wanting hear that smoke-and-velvet taunting sing-song crack high and sweet until she sings your praises in _screams_

You curl your bulge around your wrist for lack of a free hand, and the sudden pressure on your wounds completely shatters you, sending a hard hot throb of agony up the entire length of your arm. Your injured hand spasms inside you and you’re coming harder than you have in _seasons_ , arching off the pile with your feet braced on the resting platform below, teeth clenched, biting down on the ragged inside of your cheek on a string of fervent stifled curses.

You are suddenly very glad this isn’t your pile.

Fuck. You need to kill the bitch before this gets out of hand.

\---

When you haul your sorry carcass out of the standing ablution stall some hours later in the evening, your palmhusk is blowing up with notifications that you’re in the press again.

The original video post is well on its way to seven-digit views and yes, your lovely moirail has already commented, almost verbatim to your guess. You give the whole thing a claw-down on principle at the headline:

EXCLUSIVE: HURT/CoMFoRT GoLD FRoM THE RoYAL ‘RAILS W/ PAILS.

It’s trashy. You’re pure red for her, was there any shooshing? No. Papping? No, fuck you very much. And she—much to your dismay—is pale as pearls. For now. “Moirails with pails” your exquisitely sculpted _ass_.

That out of the way, it’s a decent bit of film. The soon-to-be-horrifically-dead puparazzo (This is usually the case, after all, how _dare_ he record such an intimate moment of the Empress's day? Even when she tends to actively promote the resulting footage herself? His quadrants will probably get a decent settlement off the sale of the video, at least) had great camera resolution in his eye.

He started filming late into the jam, so you at half-cleaned up and horny as hell manage to manage to pull off “intensely pitiable” instead of “utterly pathetic”. Blessedly, the feed cuts out before the two of you lose track of the gleeful homicidal nostalgia slash disturbingly appealing future plans for the Marquise (who also is never named, thank Lady Light) and She starts getting pissed at you for (admittedly) enjoying said plans too much. You aren’t surprised, that sort of thing is a niche market.

Comments are the usual mix of

“Wanna see you pap 7ha7 bu77! PAP 7HA7 FINE ASS, GE7 I7 GIRL”  

“F@Ke! F@@@@@@@Ke! LOOk @t HOw THIn HIs FIL@MENTs @Re, HE’s JUSt @ FUCKINg HIGh INDIGo WITh @ GOOd SEt Of FALSe HORNs!”

“hee’s soo fuuckiin reed foor heer, whyy doon’t theeyy juust paaiil aalreeaadyy” (This and others in similar vein get a hemoanonymous claws up)

“HeLL FuCKiN YeaH BRoTHeR, GeT You SoMe oF THaT CHoiCe RoYaL aSS”

“DUDE, l**k at his face, shit’s g*nna be PERMANENT. G*tta capitalize *n that shit, new title, any*ne? My v*te’s for “Twinscar”. *rphaner Twinscar s*unds fucking BADASS”

\--“That’5 too many letter5 with his qu!rk, d!p5h!t, !t’ll be Orphaner Twwo5car”

\----“N* *ne uses their fucking quirk in their Ascensi*n title y*u syphilitic little n**kw*rm”

\------"Ooh, way to break out the Word of the Day calendar, your lu5u5 buy that for you, 5h!t5mear?"

(This devolves into a flame war that continues for eight pages)

“HOT LOWBLOOD BITCH GETS <I<ISECTED BY ORPHANER <ERIFIED BY ANONYMOUS SER<ANT HOT PITCH ACTION SUBSCRIBE NOW”

 

One comment has almost as many upvotes as your lovely moirail’s certification of authenticity:

“CHeck out the teeth at 4:13, when he bites her finger, you fucking idiots. HAs he EVER gotten mouthy with HIC before? FUcking NO. GO check old vids, I’ll wait. I’M telling you right now, he’s not thinking about chomping down on HIC. HE’s thinking about whoever fucked up his face. CAlling it now, NEW POWER COUPLE KISSMESSITUDE ON THE HORIZON.”

A bright blue reply below that comment in stops you cold. It _can’t_ be.

\--“Thinking a8out you too, Pretty ;;;;;;;;D”

 

 


	3. Orphaner Dualscar ==> Make Her Pay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What would people say if they knew you'd gotten your title from her? Worse, exactly how it happened? A perigree of searching for her and she hasn't given up the game yet, but now that you've found her, you can't risk it. Get in, get off--OUT, get OUT--go home. Should be easy, right?

**Dualscar == > Make Her Pay**

You _loathe_ resorting to knifekind. It’s crude and messy and makes you feel like some gutterblood brawling in the street for scraps, but there’s no room on the crowded, tip-tilted deck of a slowly sinking ship full of strifing trolls for riflekind. You delog a frondkerchief and begin cleaning the disturbingly warm rainbow of blood off your claws. Your Orphaner’s overcoat is treated so it slicks right off, but your shirt isn’t and you’d hate to stain the cuffs. You duck a wildly wide punch, slide around the idiot—oh look, it’s your oafish olive friend from before!—and carve a deep curving slash up his back from kidney to scapula. You have to put a little of your strength into it to slice through his ribs but he goes down quickly enough and you step easily over his wheezing body to the main cabin door.

It’s a sturdy, steel-bound affair. You don’t bother to test the lock, you’ve no doubt she locked and barred the thing the instant your ship came broadside to hers, fleeing the scene like the scumblood slime she is before the melee strife even began—you watched her through your scope the whole time your crew was boarding, her frustrated snarl a lovely thing to behold. You’re not entirely certain why you didn’t take the shot. This just feels… right. More satisfying. You want to rub her face in her loss before your kill her, is all. A javelin whistles over your shoulder into the door. You sigh disgustedly, remove it, snap it in half, and then jam both halves underhand into the troll behind you, who goes down with a startled whine. You shove the body back a bit farther behind you without looking, twitch your clean shirt cuffs straight, smooth your hair back. At least the blood isn’t showing up on your trousers. You catch yourself fixing your necklaces so the clasps are all straight, realize you’re preening and kick the door down before you start to think about that too hard.

It crashes into the wall with an entirely satisfying, splintering crunch. She’s behind a desk positioned in a completely stupid configuration in the room. Any sensible seatroll would have it attached to the wall along the side of the room, not sticking out halfway across the limited floor space. She’s got her stupid spike-heeled boots kicked up onto the top, crossed neatly at the ankles between a pile of maps and a bowl of grapes, balancing her chair on two legs with her hands behind her head and the most terrifyingly ridiculous hat that you have ever seen pulled low over her freakish eyes.

It’s a cerulean velvet, black trimmed monstrosity with a huge tricornered brim and an enormous, drooping white feather that had to come off someone’s dad.

You need it.

She smiles lazily as you quietly, neatly push the door back into place behind you so it hangs pleasantly crooked on bent hinges and there’s a massive fissure down the middle. “Whale, whale, _whale_ , look what the mewbeasts dragged in.”

The fish puns are blasphemy in her mouth but you know she said it just to irritate you so you ignore it and manage to smile pleasantly without showing all your teeth. “Hello, Marquise.”

“Hello, Pretty.” She smiles wider, revealing all of hers as she pops the brim of her hat back, eyeing you sideways. “Or should I call you ‘ _Dualscar_ ’?”

Your smile curdles into something resembling a snarl before you can compose yourself. The Imperial medicullers did a fantastic job realigning your nose, but could do little about the ragged gashes she’d left even with your lovely moirail’s best efforts. The jagged silvery lines arc in parallel from eyebrow to opposite cheek, temple to upper lip and resemble your sign almost enough to look intentional.

“Heard about my new name, did you? I suppose I could thank you. I’m told they look quite dashin’.” You begin unfastening the myriad of tiny hooks down the side of your chest that hold the heavily brocaded front of your overcoat closed with neat, efficient motions of your claws. It’s difficult to move in and the room is nothing if not close quarters. Your cape is back on your ship for the same reason.

“Oh, but they do. Gives a little roguish twist to that fancy Orphaner getup.”

You shuck the fancy getup in question easily, smoothing the creases into place so it won’t wrinkle before hanging it from what appears to be a meat hook dangling from the low ceiling. A good portion of her decorative preference appears to be “menacing chain garlands”. She probably does her own interrogations, here in her office-slash-cabin like a barbarian.

“I have to wonder, though.” She’s doing that contemplative fang-tapping thing again. “Do your admirers know how you got them?”

You feel a growl start to bubble up in your airsacs, manage to keep it and the warning flare of your gills down. You give the high, drone-spiked collar a last twitch to straighten it and face her.

“I’m sure they think it came from something sexy, like strangling someone’s cholerbear mom, or rebel scienterrorist explosion shrapnel or at least three rogue drones… What would they say if they knew you got the last half of your title being bitchslapped by some—what was it, again?” The tip of her tongue playfully curls out between her fangs and your thighs brush the front of her desk.  You don’t remember moving and your gills tingle the way they do when fully exposed and flaring.

“Right, some ‘ _barely cold spectrum landdwelling bitch playing at Queen of the Seeeeeeeee!_ ’” the last spirals up into a delighted shriek as you wrench her entire desk off its moorings and hurl it to side of the room where it belongs. She’s laughing as she topples over backwards with a splat into the thin film of seawater washing over the floors.

You plunge after her but those damnable boots meet you halfway as she braces herself on her elbows and braybeast kicks you in the gut. The heels don’t quite puncture skin but that’s mostly due to your shirt as you stagger back, bent double. She bounces to her feet, shoves you to the side. She’s fast, but you’re naturally stronger and you catch her around the waist before she can get past you, throwing her into the wreckage of her desk. Her hat goes flying and her laughter chokes off in a pained gasp as her head impacts roughly with a broken corner. She hisses, reaches back to feel it, sprawled gracelessly on a pile of splinters. You stand upright, chin and chest out a bit as her hand comes back slick with bright blue. She smirks up at you, smears it down the bodice of her waistcoat and you follow her hand down, you can’t help it. You almost miss the fruit bowl she flings at your face with the other hand. It clips your shoulder and she’s coming at you with a showy roundhouse kick that would probably flare her coat out if it weren’t soaked at the hems.

You catch her leg easily, use it to wrench her off balance but she torques her hips, does something complicated so her free leg takes your knee out and you both go down in the ankle-deep water with a splash. You’re on your hands and knees and she delivers another of those shattering two-footed kicks from her back to your left side gills and fuck that was a rib cracking. Maybe two.

You roll with it, your vision staining red as you stagger to your feet and there she is again, this time with an incredibly telegraphed punch you catch easily. You miss the opposite hand coming in low and fast for your abdomen. She gets three quick jabs into your diaphragm before you grab hold of a horn, a shoulder, sink your claws in and repeatedly drive your knee up into her stomach until her legs give out as you try to force your lungs to start working again. You cough, drop her to the floor and manage to get a half-assed kick of your own in, right in the vascular filtration sacs. As she scrambles up snarling you catch a handful of her rich wet-silk curls, yanking her back and you still can’t _fucking breathe_.

She turns into your pull, snarling, drops her shoulder and bulls right into your sternum, knocking the little wind you’d recovered back out of you. You stumble over something in the water and her weight drops you to the floor onto your back. She’s on top of you, straddling your hips and— _holding you underwater?!_

She’s pushing down on your shoulders with everything she has, and you can hear her distorted laughter—like she’s _won_ something. You take three huge gulping swallows of sour, life-giving seawater, surface like leviathan, all snapping teeth. Her nose impacts your forehead with a soggy crunch and you throw her bodily off you, surging to your feet.

You make a show of forcing the last of the water out your gills, flaring them wide as faintly-purple-tinged seawater pours out in a rush from your neck and sides. She staggers up, cobalt streaming down her face from her shattered nose and the tears in her lips from her own fangs and she’s laughing like a cultist on a miraculous rampage.

“You ain’t gonna convvince me you could possibly be stupid enough to try and drowwn a fuckin’ _seadwweller_ —” Your accent always comes out stronger when you’re excited, furious, aroused, and the black bile in your throat lends credence to all of the above.

She snorts with laughter, winces, and tips her chin up. Her smile is brighter than ever, laced with blue and full of triumph you can’t even comprehend. There’s dark circles already blooming under her eyes, her bottom lip is swollen nearly as plush as the top and blood is pouring from her nose in a wide unbroken stripe halfway down her neck. She’s standing tall, favoring one knee, chest heaving distractingly and in such a way you’re pretty sure you messed up a couple of her ribs too and you have never seen such a perfect picture of brass-globe defiance in your life, this beautiful terrible gods-damned disaster of a woman.

She licks her fangs, smiling that smile all the while. “Naaaaaaaah… but your hair is _fucked_ now.”

You’re on her in an instant, slamming her back against a bookcase so hard an entire shelf falls out of alignment to the floor. Her head snaps back, horns cracking against the underside of another shelf, then forward and you’re crushing your mouth against hers so hard your teeth clack.

This…This was not your original plan.

But she’s kissing you like she’s drowning, fully intending to drag you down with her and she tastes like shallow tropic water where streams meet the sea, bright and clear and sharp with landdweller poison.

You tear yourself away, one of her oversized fangs slicing through your bottom lip as you tangle your hand at the base of her head, wrenching it back again to expose her neck, your teeth snapping forward. You can fit the entire width of her throat in your jaws, your cheek is tucked up underneath her chin but you don’t bite down, you can’t, because if you can never tear those hungry, desperate little sounds from her lips again you will die for want of it.

Her claws are scrabbling over your shoulders, shredding the fabric there and scratching dozens of fine weeping lines through the holes. She’s tugging at your sleeves, your collar and you realize the short panting breaths against your fin are words—a word—off off _off off off OFF OFF **OFF**_

You release her, pull back, fuck, you misjudged things again. She’s growling at you, deep and raspy with a fluting trill you’ve never heard before and, wait, no, she’s yanking your head back down with one hand, tearing at your loosened collar with the other. She’s kissing you and cursing you again, tongue and teeth and heat how can a blue be so warm—now now _now now now NOW NOW **NOW**_ —she rips out the laces on your shirtfront halfway down your chest and you writhe your shoulders out until she hums in approval.

She shoves your wet sleeves farther down your arms, hissing into your mouth when they catch on your wrists and a cufflink goes spinning off into the water in your haste to free yourself as she takes her frustration out on the body of your shirt, ripping it open down the front. You’re peeling the ruined mess of silk-satin out of your beltline when she hooks her fingers into your thoracic gills. Your mouth drops open, the bottom falls out of your stomach and you don’t know whether to scream or unsheathe in your trousers.

She’s not hurting you, not much, not yet, but she’s has all her fingers splayed along your ribs, lifting the opercula up entirely too far in a way that says this could be _very, very bad_ and it’s viciously thrilling in the worst way. She smirks against your mouth, shoves her knees between yours and crooks her fingers slightly; pulling your hips flush against hers and _oh_ you can feel the writhing of her through your clothes.

She snarls when you fist both hands in the bodice of her shirt, pierces your bottom lip with her fangs when you wrench the whole thing open, buttons flying off her shirt and waistcoat, silk-and-steel corset like paper under your claws. Your palms stroke up and down her disgustingly smooth-skinned sides and she whimpers when you press into her bruised gilless ribs, rolling her hips into yours.

You trail hard kisses down her neck, over the perfect arcs of ragged cuts from your earlier bite—she wants to steal your jewelry? You’ll give her necklaces she can’t take off—curving crescents from your teeth looping her neck, shoulders, chest like lace—blue now, silver later and you’ll drape the silver scars in pearls and amethysts until she _strangles_ on them.

The buttons on her trousers are easier and she pulls half her fingers away from your breathing apparatus long enough to yank your head up by a horn.  You kiss her again, trilling into her mouth as her bulge slithers into your hands on another of those fluting growls. She’s slick and _warm_ and curling eagerly around your fingers and digging her fingers into your gills and it’s almost enough but—

You’ve been here before

A woman in your arms with claws in your hair, Her skin pressed to yours

Hungry and wanting and out of your mind with lust

And it was all a game, a lie, a _misunderstanding._

Her hand drops to pull at your belt. You slap it away distractedly and she snarls—claws scratch wildly at your lower stomach, both hands now, and yours snap to her throat, force her head back, force her chin up, force her to look at you.

“You—” You stop, breathe, force the right words out around your growl, your bitten tongue and torn mouth.

“Do you wwant me?”

She chokes, incredulous, gasping out, “ _Seriously_?”

You give her a shake; bounce her head off the bookshelf again.

“ _Answer me_.”

There’s her blue on both your hands, your stomach, all over your mouth and she shakes her hair out of her eyes to stare at you, all her freakish blue blue _blue_ eyes focused on you. You realize you were almost pleading through the haze of black pheromones, and she sees something in your eyes that makes hers light up like it’s her wriggling day and you just handed her keys to your Empress’s treasury.  She sees what you need, and why, and you realize with a sick thrill that not only will this woman destroy you, but you just told her how.

You look forward to it.

You release her, drop your claws to her hips as her hands slide down your stomach and her lips part.

“ _Yes_.” It comes out as a hiss against your mouth and burns through you like Lady’s Rain, like the venom in her biting kisses until you press your forehead against hers on a ragged moan as she unbuckles your belt.

No teasing, no tricks, no games just her strong warm hands on you, drawing you out with firm smooth strokes down your length. You sink your claws into her hips, a warble ripping through your throat as she spirals your bulges around each other— _fuck_.

She hums gleefully through her teeth, nipping playfully at your mouth. “Wanted you since I fucked up your pretty face that night in my hold.” Your only response is an embarrassingly eager whine.

You hate her voice, it’s acid and velvet and barbed wire and rich dark wine and honey and thick toxic smoke and if she _ever_ stops talking you’re going to tear her tongue out through her windpipe. You are _never_ this vocal. Chirps and trills and lyrical growls pour from you like water, you’re almost singing for her and she’s playing you like an instrument.

“See you walk in here with that Imperial stick up your fine ass and wanted to tear you apar— _fuck_ —w-wanted to s-see the monster that near t-took my leg off—oh fuck oh good fucking god _damn_ —” She’s twining your entangled bulges around her fingers,  grinding her hips against yours, one slurry-sticky hand around your horn again and she’s egging you on.

“Wanted this—wanted teeth and claws and _fuck_ wanted my f-fucking bulge in you—”

You can’t parse half what she’s saying anymore, most of it is incoherent noises of her own and curses when you deliberately stutter the rhythm of your hips but all of it is encouragement. You flex your claws deeper, pull her closer, and she is getting closer, every inch of her body humming with want—of you, your body, your touch—as you drop a hand from her hip over hers, squeeze her hand and your writhing bulges between your stomachs and watch her bright eyes roll back on a wail. She’s shaking in your hands, gritting her teeth as she focuses all those beautiful eyes on you again.

You can’t see her smile but you can feel it against your mouth as she snarls—

_Not without you­_

It rings through your body as her spine arches, dark and compelling, pulling you with her—your vision whites out as blue-violet cascades down your tangled legs and she _keens_ through the ringing in your ears.

You’re still coming down when her head rolls back and she sags against the battered bookcase. She’s making these delicious, insufferable little satisfied noises deep in her throat that cut off in a wince as you peel your hands from the claw-holes in her hip and other sticky, oversensitive parts. Your drop your head dizzily to her sluggishly bleeding shoulder, bouncing a horn off her cheekbone and damn it even that is too much stimulation. You want to lie down. You’re exhausted and everything is too much and at the same time you feel fantastic and you’ll be damned if you crack first. You halfheartedly scrub your hands off on her sopping coat until she makes a disgusted noise. Her hands flop weakly at her sides for a bit, and you snicker against her bloody, sticky neck. She shoves her chin into your temple and it takes her three tries to grab your hands.

It’s less amusing when she yanks them above your head and clamps them into a pair of hanging manacles as thick as your thumb. That bitch.

You twist around in the chains as she wriggles past you, cackling wildly, holding her pants up with one hand as she sloshes off through the now thigh-high water to retrieve her hat. Clearly, the Sisters hate you, because it’s somehow still dry as she sweeps it dramatically off another shelf onto her head, bows, flips you off and splashes towards the door.

She yanks the door open, delogs a sword and dives into the fray without bothering to close her shirt.

You’ve no doubt she’ll escape, but hopefully one-handed she’ll leave enough of your crew alive to find and unlock you, if you can’t tear yourself free first.

You haul yourself up hand over hand into the chain garlands, looking for the bolt to your particular set and try to rationalize how the _hell_ you started thinking of quadrant jewelry on a first hatedate.

 

 


	4. Marquise Mindfang => 8reak and Enter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes scratching an itch requires breaking into your hatedate's hive, stealing all his stuff, and possibly smothering him to death with your anterior thoracic padding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay! Moving makes writing difficult.

You close his door behind you as quietly as you can. You aren’t worried about the guards, at least until shift change. The light of your burning sign illuminates the suite in dim blue phosphorescence, holding the two guards immediately outside in a light trance, a simple you-see-and-hear-nothing-unusual state of mind and providing just enough light to keep you from tripping over rugs or skulls or more guns or clothes or whatever else he keeps in here. It shouldn’t be much, it’s one of his surface-vacation hives but you can’t be too careful because he’s _such_ a peacock.

His recuperacoon is huge, basically a small swimming pool in the far corner and as tall as your chest, but you don’t see him in it. You strip your boots off, padding across the room in stocking feet and peer over the edge into the weirdly thin, transparent sopor.

There he is, loosely curled on his side at the bottom, mouth half open and gills fluttering gently. Is he _breathing_ his sopor? Gross.  There goes your original plan, (Death by pseudomammarian thoracic padding suffocation. It’s how he’d want to go.) but this could still be fun. You strip quickly and hoist yourself up, leaning over the edge with your feet swinging into the air for counterbalance. You take a moment to ogle his glutes before you plunge both hands into the watery sopor, hauling him up by the horns.

He surfaces loudly, roaring and coughing up watery slime, thrashing in your hands and splashing all over the everything. You clamp down harder on the guards until he stops coughing, wincing as his claws rake down your arms, and kiss him full on the mouth before you release him and drop to the floor.

He falls back into the thin slime with a splash, shoving his hair back out of his face.

“Th’ fu—? Y—“ Another cough, spraying sopor, “Spin? Howww th’ fuck d’you get in here?”

Heh, asshole warbles even worse when he wakes up, you need to remember this. You make your sign pulse a little brighter for a second and give him your best “Are you serious right now?” sardonic smile.

He groans sleepily and paddles to your side of the ‘cupe, hooking his elbows over the edge. “Right. Stupid question,” he yawns, stretching his jaws in a show of translucent white-violet terror. “On that note, if you’re thinkin’ a comin’ in here and poisonin’ my sopor, don’t bother. The filtration system in this thing is top of the line.”

You smile and cock your hip, posing a bit. “Do I look like I’m here to poison you?”

He stops scrubbing slime out of his eye with the heel of his hand for a moment, actually _looks_ at you and goes from sleepy idiot to leering sex fiend in half a second. _Asshole_. And here you used to think the phrase “offensively pretty” was just trashy blackromance novel hyperbole. “Wwell. Top of the evvenin’ to you too. You come here often?”

“Hoped to. Thought I might wake you up with a nice faceful of bulge, but noooooooo, freaky fish boys have to sleep under their sopor.”

“Right, that wwould have wworked out wwell for you,” he snorts, and lazily snaps his sea monster teeth. Ah. Right. That would have ended badly.

He flexes his spine with a drawn out, almost sexual groan and stretches his long legs out behind him before he rests his chin on his folded arms. He waggles his eyebrows at you. “Unless, a course, you meant your mouth and _my_ bulge.”

“Even if that was what I meant—it wasn’t—we still have the issue of you being underwater. How do you even sleep without daymares, shit’s all watered down.”

“Wwell—” He’s interrupted by a loud knocking at the doors and you freeze. Shift change already? You can’t ensnare the new guards without eye contact, you don’t know them, they’re behind a door, there’s no telling how many of them there are and if they come in not only are you an extremely wanted felon but also an extremely _naked_ one. Some of your pan—not panic, you’re not panicking— _mild apprehension_ must show on your face, because his leer has turned insufferably smug.

The knocking continues while he watches you squirm. “My lord? My lord Orphaner, is everything all right in there? We heard voices…?”

He watches you with hooded eyes, casually, possessively admiring your body before he locks eyes with you. He does it so easily, fearlessly. He knows he’s safe, even if he’s wrong about it being due to his hemocaste, and you hate him for his complacent confidence.

“Yeah, you’re hearin’ my vvoice tellin’ you to fuck right off,” he drawls.

You manage to suppress a sigh of relief even if you do sag against the ‘cupe a little.

“Sir?”

He sighs disgustedly, and you find yourself a little disappointed that bubbles don’t come out his gill slits. How does his freaky walking fish breathing apparatus even work, anyway? He catches you looking and does it again, though this time something glottal clicks in his throat and bubbles do come out. He almost smiles when you suppress a giggle before he coughs awkwardly, clearing his throat, and turns to the door.

“Look, if you lot aren’t playin’ deaf, mute and fuckin’ blind within the next five seconds, I’m gonna come out there and make it a reality, clear?”

Silence.

“There, see? One of the many advantages of being a univversally feared, all powerful ‘freaky fish boy’.  For example,” He flicks one finger up, spattering you with sopor.  “It’s wwatered down because I don’t like the real stuff gummin’ up my gills, and when it’s watered dowwn I can actually sink down, breathe proper, and feel at home. It’s makin’ direct contact with my breathin’ apparatus so I don’t need it real strong, and it’s easier to clean off. No daymares.”

A second finger, and his leer broadens as he drawls, all but purring, “And I’vve nevver had trouble wwith bein’ underwwater.”

He doesn’t mean—

He licks his fangs and does the eyebrow thing again.

He does.

He surges up out of the sopor, wrapping both arms around your waist and hauling you head-first and shrieking over his shoulder into the watery goo. You surface with a sputtering gasp, half choking on a mouthful of hair plastered flat over your face and around your horns-- _fuck_ that’s going to be a nightmare to untangle. You glare daggers at him and push the whole mess out of your face as he presses you back against the side of the ‘cupe with his hands on your knees. Your glutes bump against a ledge--oh good, he does have normal sleeping arrangements--as he leans in to kiss you. You snap your teeth at him, miss and resolve to hunt down his stylissailant, make them fix your hair on his tab, and then kill them. He snaps back and inwardly you despair at how it’s so much more impressive on him. Goblin shark trumps spider fangs. You will never tell him and oh sweet mother grub he wants to put that near your junk. Why did you think this was a good idea?!

You may not have told him he has a somewhat intimidating fibrous-vegetation-shredder for a face, but he seems to have gotten the hint from your failing pokerface anyway, as his smug grin seems determined to wrap around his head until the top half falls off. You force an answering cocky smirk onto your face--this was your idea, you can’t back out now and he likes your bulge, right? He wouldn’t ruin a good thing for both of you, right? Oh fuck he’s going under in a flood of bubbles. You tell yourself he’s just clearing the air from his vascular sacs in preparation to switch to the other vascular sacs or slits or filaments or whatever but he’s probably also laughing at you.

He spreads your knees as the bubbles clear, abruptly pushing you back so your glutes are firmly parked on the seating ledge. You flinch at the motion--fuuuuuuuuck this was such a bad idea--but he just grins up at you through the water and drifting threads of his hair, running his palms up the outsides of your thighs almost soothingly, which is just _weird_.

He’s pressing cool, slow kisses with no teeth at all up from the inside of your knee, your legs hooked around his shoulders as he lingers over the thick ring of scar tissue across the top of your thigh, tracing over the ridged marks of the very first bite he ever gave you with the flat of his tongue. His hands curl around your hips, thumbs tracing over the ridges of your hipbones with disconcerting gentleness as he sucks a small bruise into the inner crease of your thigh, slow and easy.

You shift uncomfortably, claws scratching at the seat. This is nice and all, you guess, but it started with you thinking he’d bite your bulge off and now it’s getting disturbingly flushed and-- _oh_. Oh wow.

He just licked a long stripe up the slit of your nook, cool and insistent and precisely one quarter of an inch to the left of your slowly emerging bulge-tip.

He grins up at you, a crooked flash of mischievous fangs, and does it again, this time ever-so-slightly to the right as your bulge begins to uncoil with genuine interest.

So that’s how he’s going to play this. Now we’re talking. You smirk down at him, though he probably can’t see you clearly, and lounge indolently back against the side of the ‘cupe, even pulling your arms out of the thin sopor to rest along the edges. You cross your ankles loosely between the flat bones of his arm hinges and roll your hips a bit. _Give it your best shot, fishface_.

He’s gone back to those torturously slow kisses, careful to keep his teeth out of the way with the occasional cool sliding pressure of his tongue along the edges of your nook, then one firm stroke inside and that wrenches a hitching gasp out of you that he can probably feel if not properly hear as your bulge unsheathes completely.

His eyes are dark and knowing and apparently it’s possible for him to smirk even when he’s curling his tongue around the root of your bulge--that really shouldn’t be as hot as it is--he’s going so damned _slow_ and looking entirely too pleased with himself.

You may not be able to match the dexterity of a seadweller’s apparatus but you can manage to make your bits writhe in such a way that you can bap him in the face. _Ha_.

You get another flash of fang in response, this one more menacing than mischievous, and he takes a hand from your hip long enough to trap your errant bulge against your stomach. He draws a hissing moan you sincerely hope he can’t hear underwater out of you as he curls two fingers into your nook, mouthing the edges almost lazily and then his tongue does something that has your hips bucking hard against his face, your twitching bulge pinned almost painfully under his hand, pulled nearly taut and unable to coil around anything and _oh don’t you fucking dare pull away now you beautiful fucking bastard._

You clamp your thighs down around his head, the weird spiky leather of earfins jabbing into the soft curve of your inner thigh, and when he struggles you wrench his head back into position by his horns as he snarls, a flicker of bright white razors against blue-grey skin that should terrify but only thrills. He glares up at you with lust-blackened eyes dark as pitch through sopor rapidly turning faintly blue as he roughly fists your aching bulge, tongue and fingers curling deep into you like he’s going for your fucking seedflap as you dig your claws into the roots of his horns and fall screaming over the edge of orgasm in his hands.  

He doesn’t give you the chance to catch your breath before he hauls you off the seating ledge and into his lap, his bulge writhing into your still-pulsing nook as you struggle to keep your head above the surface, gasping for air and for pleasure as he takes you from below, dragging you down like the sea monster you know he could be.

\---

When you wobb— _sashay_ , you’re sashaying, there is no wobble—back down his hallway the following evening, you have two artistically fresh bite marks on your shoulders seeping blue through your stolen violet silk robe.  You stole the short robe with its pattern of gold stars because it was clearly his favorite and your clothes were ruined with splashed slime-water. You stole the entire contents of his personal jewelry case because you can (even if none of it is as nice as the stuff he keeps commissioning for you, you both know nothing you could ever steal would be that nice).

There was also a rather lovely set of blueprints (purple paper, of course, but they’re still blueprints) on his desk, detailing a lovely little three-masted schooner with a rather unique figurehead.  It’s a painstakingly detailed nude female troll, her knee-length hair wrapped artfully around her hips, not quite hiding a curl that might possibly be an unsheathed bulge (it’s definitely a bulge, and it’s anatomically accurate). She’s unusually well-padded in the thorax, her arms outstretched in a Y across the bow and her long legs trailing down for days. Close observation would reveal hundreds of gouges in the shoulders, neck and chest region arranged in crescent shapes that may or may not resemble bite scars. (These are also accurate)

Notes in the margins indicate he intended to chain the figure’s hands to the bow with the manacles recovered from your first hatedate, but there wasn’t nearly enough for the larger-than-life effigy.

He sent a diving team to the coordinates of the shipwreck to recover more from your office shortly before you arrived at his manse.

You decide you will beat the team to the wreck and send him the lead diver’s severed, rotting head in a box, on top of a tangled pile of the the rest of the chains and the following note:

“It’s forked horn on my left, 8ar8ed horn on my right, and you kn8w it, you sh8meless 8ulge tease <3<”

You deliberately splatter sopor from your soaking hair the entire length and breadth of his foyer for him to find in when he wakes up, because you might possibly be willing to admit that seadwellers may have one slight advantage over landdwellers in very, very specific circumstances. 


	5. Dualscar ==> Cele8r8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> About fucking time. Sorry guys, this was just supposed to be a snippet between chapters and then it blocked on me.  
> Edit: Now with 25% more pr0n!

She’s precisely five hours, twenty-three minutes and nineteen seconds late to the Float Out Ceremony, and two hours, forty-four minutes, forty-nine seconds too late to make the afterparty, making her exactly eight hours, eight minutes and eight seconds late in total because of _course_ she is when she strolls into the Captain’s Suite on your Dark Lady like she owns it.

You hold up the stopwatch to prove it without looking up from your husktop and quickly tab out of Undersized Long-Tailed Primates Defend Ambiguous Unseen Stronghold From Unending Onslaught Of Inflated Synthetic Fibrous Vegetation Vascular Fluid Spheres By Means Of Thrown Projectiles, Incendiaries, and Corrosives: The Game: 5 because you’ve been sitting here doing important Imperial datawork. Or something. Who gives a shit she’s here now and that means hopefully you’ll be able to get out of this damned overstarched collar. You like to dress sharp, absolutely, but even you have limits and these epaulets are ridiculous. The things you do for hate.

“You’re late to the party, bitterness.” You fold your claws on your desk and briefly wish you’d thought to leave your reading glasses on so you could glare over them disapprovingly, but it’s probably best she doesn’t know you’re somewhat farsighted. If tonight goes right she'll figure it out eventually, but why hand her a weakness?

“How can I be late to a party I wasn’t invited to?”

“Generally one doesn’t invite their--" deep breath, here goes everything, "--their k-kismesis to anything.” Her eyes--all of them--go wide at ‘kismesis’ even with your awkward stumbling and oh hell you can feel your earfins heating up--do not blush, you are a grown coddamn troll making a serious but entirely casual proposal _pull yourself together._ You cough slightly to recover some measure of dignity. "And quite frankly I’m surprised you let that stop you.”

She continues staring at you, blinks twice, and picks idly at a bit of carving on the doorframe. You try not to wince, she’s going to scratch the finish. Shit. You should have been more romantic. Said something mid-swordfight, she loves swordfights, _"I'll see you in hell when I drag you down with me!"_ or _“I want to tear your bilesack out barehanded and keep it in a jar until the moons turn to ash!”_ Oh that would have been spectacular.

The silence drags on, broken only by the faint scritch scritch of her needle-claws on wood. This is a disaster, you know she's not platonic for you, but you may have just screwed the barkbeast on that account. You try not to fiddle with your husktop stylus or anything else on your desk or tap your foot or chew your lip or breathe weirdly or or or

You have never been so nervous in your life.

Maybe you should just kill her and spare you both the embarrassment.

You don’t quite understand her reaction--it’s not like you haven’t been demonstrative in your loathing, you’ve blown up no less than half her pirate fleet, personally assassinated six rival captains and even shot a spade into the side of her flagship with your best rifle last perigee, shortly before you blew the whole thing to splinters with your brand new ion cannons, honestly, you--oh. _Oh_.

A wicked, indulgent smile curls across her lips like an oil spill, and only widens at your dawning horror--she _knows_. She knows how you feel and she’s chosen this emotionally wrought, poignant moment to fuck with your head. 

She’s _perfect_.

“Why would I even want to go to some stupid party with a bunch of bubble-brained bureaucrats crowding up the deck of my new ship when I can just make my kismesis give me a grand tour?”

Your bloodpusher jumps into your throat and Light damn expressive seadweller anatomy because your fucking fins just flicked up and back like an excited wiggler’s. She’s grinning hard now, those ridiculous curving fangs glittering in the moonlight and--hang on. ‘ _Her_ ship’?!

" _Your_ ship? I believe you are sorely mistaken, my dear spade," you growl. Your spade. _Yours_.

She smirks as you stand, and begins scratching at the doorframe with greater intent. "Why else would you name her after me? Your 'Dark Lady'?"

"Yes. Exactly. _Mine_." You snarl the last, and her smug grin widens as your claws sink into the sleek, highly polished surface of your brand new, extremely expensive desk. Light blast her, she did that on purpose. Gods, you hate this girl so much, and she knows you so well.

"Yours. And yet she has my symbol carved into her.”

She scratched her symbol into the doorframe. Of course she did. She stands her ground as you prowl towards her, loom over her. The light from your desk turns you into a fantastically threatening silhouette and she got taller heels so she can look you in the eye, that’s _adorable_.

“She also has your effigy on the bowsprit in chains,” you growl. She sneers, candlelight reflecting off the flawless blue lacquer she paints over her mouth. You want it smeared across your skin. “Perhaps I should make it more literal.”

She slowly sweeps her hat off--finally, the brim covered both your heads and barely fit into the door--dragging the nails of her free hand along your jaw. You know this trick. Next she’s going to grab you by the back of the neck and break your nose on her forehead. Again. You have an idea.

“Catch me first,” she whispers and lunges. You deliberately go up on your toes, lift your chin--and meet her teeth first. You leave two of them embedded in her scalp as she jumps back, snarls, calls you a bilgefucker and punches you in the gut before spinning precariously on a spike heel, awkwardly stepping over her discarded hat and clattering up the stairs to the main deck.

You snicker, spit another tooth onto the deck and follow. You’d stopped caring about your dental bill perigrees ago, and _that_ was entirely worth it. You hit the top of the stairs as she finishes freeing a cannon from its mooring lines and shoves it at you before taking off down the deck towards the mainmast. You leap, roll across the top on your shoulders and begin tearing at the fastenings of your overcoat the second your boots hit the deck.

She laughs, her sword snapping out and to the side into a line securing a boom you duck easily, though you stumble and go ass over antlers onto the barrel of gunpowder she sent rolling behind her with a well-placed if wobbly kick. Those shoes are clearly murder on her ankles. You leave your powder-stained coat behind you on the deck and catch up in half a dozen long strides as she slows to descend the forward hatch stairs without breaking her neck.

You catch her by the coattails, hauling her back against your chest for a sloppy, bruising kiss until she wriggles out and away. She teeters wildly at the top of the stairs for a moment, arms windmilling until she flings one around your shoulders to steady herself.

You are now laughing so hard your gills click--at this rate you’ll give yourself a pneumothorax--and you _wheeze_ when she levels a blistering glare at you.

“That never happened.”

“That _absolutely_ happened.”

“Fuck you,” she snaps, eloquent as ever, as she grabs your belt and yanks your trousers down around your boot tops. She then shoves you until you fall over sideways and proceeds scoot down the stairs on her ass.

This is it, this is how you die: Laughing yourself to death at your kismesis as she bitches about splinters in her ass. _How is everything so perfect?_      

You kick your boots and trousers off, rolling over onto your belly to watch her fight with the long laces of one thigh-high red boot in the warm golden light pouring out from the crew’s mess hall. Her little hopping frustration dance does interesting things to her rumblespheres, since apparently there wasn’t much under the coat _but_ the boots. A series of whistles and cheering from the mess hall agrees with you.

Boots and a laser pistol, apparently, as she fires a series of shots into the mess hall, turning catcalls into pained screams. Where was she keeping that? Whoops she’s got the boot off now, better catch her before you lose the advantage.

She yelps and hobbles towards the mess hall, hilariously uneven, as you leap the entire staircase, pick her up around the waist and throw her onto the table amid groans of pain and “Seriously, boss? Here?” from your crew.

You crawl over the table, growling throatily, intending to loom sexily over her, but your knee and hand splash messily into two separate bowls of stew and she kicks you in the shoulder with her stockinged foot, knocking you off balance enough for her to wriggle away and limp into the short hallway leading back to your quarters.

More whistles as you pull your shirt over your head--so much for maintaining an Orphaner’s sense of discipline and decency before his crew--scrub stew off yourself and follow her.

Light, you’d follow her into hell itself, you realize, as you slam the door behind you and drag her into your arms.

You bury your hands in her hair, scrape your claws against a hornbed until she shudders, snarling against your mouth as she shoves you back into the heavy door. Flat waxy lipstick mingles with the sting of her venom and the salt of your blood on your tongue, and you dig your teeth into her lip to taste her sweetness as she shreds the waistband of your shorts in her claws.

You hiss as she opens still more stinging scratches over your hipbones though she mercifully keeps her claws out of the way as she pushes the heel of her hand against your sheath, her knuckles against the rim of your nook until you rock into her hand. She grins evilly as your eyes roll back on a moan, though it falters on a gasp of her own when you palm her spheres roughly, her corset having shifted down enough to have them spilling out over the top.

“Caught you,” you purr, and dig your claws in just enough to make her whimper a little.

“Lucky break,” she growls, grabbing a handful of your ass in each hand to grind against you. Her bulge is out already, writhing out from under the edges of a scrap of soaked lace hardly worthy of calling underwear.

You had a really good response to that--really, you did--but at that moment she roars, plants her uneven feet and hoists you up off the ground and onto her bulge by sheer leg strength and you are suddenly entirely too turned on for words because _holy shit_.

You scramble for leverage, one hand finding the doorknob and the other scrabbling wildly at the door itself as you keen,  her bulge pulsing roughly into you. There’s ornate carvings digging into your shoulder blades as she shifts a bit, hooking your knees over her elbows, until you have no support but what she gives you, her offset legs somehow providing a better angle to drive you insane. Her rumblespheres are pushed against your chest and your bulge is trapped between your bodies, unable to do more than coil slickly against the rough brocade of her corset and the taut muscles of your abdomen as she fucks you brainless.

“Lucky break,” she pants. You can barely hear her over your own desperate breathless whine, so close to already, she feels so fucking perfect. You shove a hand between your bodies, your bulge twining eagerly around our fingers as your squeeze in time with her hips, and the rough pulse of her bulge inside you. “For _me_.”

 _Fuck_. You’re gone, violet slurry squelching messily between you as she fucks you through the aftershocks, tireless and inexorable as the tide. She’s devastating, unstoppable and perfect and she’s yours.     

\--------

Hours later, late moonlight trickles through the shredded curtain over your tiny window onto your doorframe, where your jagged symbol has been scratched over hers, and enclosed in a spade because you’re a hopeless romantic and you don’t care who knows. She’s dragging her claws idly over your scalp, attempting to sculpt Alternia’s Worst Sex Hair and occasionally flicking your aching horn with a casual finger. You really hope it isn’t broken. Your desk definitely is. You’re drawing patterns in the blue-violet smears on her chest, your head resting on her pelvic support structure as you make swirls that follow the lacy bite scars you’ve finally managed to make look artistic and and intentional.

She hums thoughtfully, twirling the oddly colored streak in your forelock around her finger. You hum inquiringly back, turning your head to gnaw thoughtfully on the ridge of a grubscar. She whines and pulls your hair until you stop--they’re ticklish.

“I was thinking I might show up at one of your fancy-pants highblood shindigs, one of these nights.”

You grin against her skin, eyeing the wreckage of your beautifully appointed stateroom. “Swweetspade, I wwould _lovve_ to see you try,” you snicker, and blow a raspberry into the vulnerable flesh of her belly until she squeals.   

 

 


	6. [S] Mindfang ==> Gatecrash Fancy-Pants Highblood Shindig

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one has background music, link embedded in fic when the music starts :D

You are well underway to gatecrashing this fancy-pants highblood shindig.

The hard part is getting into said shindig without causing a fuss. You want the fuss to happen after you get there. You _are_ the fuss.

It’s easy enough to get to the host’s beachfront hive. It's a beach. You have a boat. You, and, of course, all your crew, are dressed to the eights and no one stops you on the way from the docks. You are fancy and clearly going somewhere important.

You are also heavily armed.

The hive itself is something out of that Better Hives and Lawnrings feed where the realtorturers have competitions to remodel and sell antique hives no one below indigo could ever hope to afford in new, terrifyingly ostentatious ways. The ablution block sudden-death bonus round is always the best. You’re pretty sure no one needs to have that many gargoyles, and make a mental note to add more to the foyer of your dream hive plans.

The front door is heavily guarded, and your boys are already equipping strifekind before you finish climbing the stairs. One of the guards—who clearly has more muscle than thinkmeat—has the gall to ask you for an invitation. You don’t _need_ an invitation.

You’re telling him as much with your sword at his throat when another one shoves him out of the way and gestures you inside. He’s babbling—no, no of course not, your grace, you don’t need an invitation no of course please come in please don’t slaughter us all your grace you look lovely your grace—and staring at your rumblespheres.

You sweep past him in a swirl of cerulean petticoats and start to smile as he gets chewed out by his superior. About time someone noticed you around here. Even if it was because your padding is pushed up nearly to your chin. He’s squealing through the blood pouring out his mouth over the chewing—No, don’t stop her no no please oh gods are you insane that’s _Dualscar’s girl_!—Oh hell.

Your second winces sympathetically at your sudden snarl. It wasn’t _you_ the idiot was looking at, it was your necklace. Shit. You shouldn’t have worn it. It’s not one of the ones he gave you, of course. You hocked all of those. A fortune in pearls, white and black and lavender, ropes of them strung with amethyst and tanzanite and tourmalines the size of your two thumbs together and shark’s teeth for memory, sold for a pittance to any prawnbroker stupid enough to buy seadweller kismesis jewelry (there aren’t many) until you found out one of said stupid prawnbrokers was stupid enough to actually sell a piece for profit. You used the razor-studded strand in question as something between a garrote and a chainsaw on the necks of both buyer and seller. It was remarkably effective.

You’re wearing a crudely woven layered necklace with dozens of shark’s teeth that did in fact come from him, but not willingly. You’ve been painstakingly collecting every one you break out of his stupid face for perigrees now, ever since you noticed that new ones apparently move into place within a matter of hours because of _course_ freaky fish mouths are overcompensatory that way. You were going to flaunt it in his aforementioned stupid face for the first time tonight. Unfortunately the translucent white-violet shine of them and the scars lacing your shoulders are distinctive, and the first guards’ reactions to you prove to be a trend as you and your crew head to the ballroom. You’re getting increasingly annoyed with every fawning guard and carapace and lackey and start having your crew rough them up a bit as you go, but no one will touch you, because even if some of them recognize you as The Marquise, you’re always _Dualscar’s Girl_. You grit your teeth for a moment and force yourself to smile serenely. No matter. After tonight, they’ll fear you in your own right.

Your second steps ahead of you a bit as you come onto the huge balcony overlooking the ballroom floor. You can see dozens of trolls in jewel-bright jackets and sweeping dresses dancing a slow, elaborate, boring waltz. She snatches the little juvenile herald up by his fancy frilled collar and dangles him, squeaking shrilly, over the edge until the music fumbles to a halt and all eyes turn up to you. You lean over the edge, hands on the railing as your crew descends the twin staircases to the floor. They’re in their finest, but pirate silks and satins tend to be a bit more ragged, a bit more mismatched, and a bit more prone to bright-rainbow bloodstains than the finery on the floor. You think it makes a nice contrast. The party-guests seem to disagree, judging by the looks of disgust, growls and sporadic equipping of strifekind. Many of them, however, merely look curious. Blackflirting on this scale is an entertainment rarity. While your relationship is public knowledge, no one in his social circle has seen the two of you interact and, well, your Pretty is famous for his public romantic indiscretions.

He’s directly across the room, looking annoyingly impeccable as usual in a  black topcoat with tails and pinstriped trousers. There’s a new silver horn brace halfway down the shaft of the left one, where you kicked it two perigrees ago falling off his collapsing desk, but there’s not a stitch of white on him, which is odd but perhaps it’s rude to wear parts of someone’s mother to this sort of party? Oh, wait, no, there are white leather gloves in his violet waistcoat pocket, and he’s got teeth—something feline—dangling from his earfins where you pierced them. He seems determined to own and flaunt everything you do to him--including, finally, letting his nose heal crookedly across the bridge--and it is a vast improvement on his prissy persona. 

You hate when he looks like this, aloof and sneering and sterile like his strength is in his blood and his style. They’re not afraid of _him_ , with his slicked-back hair and crisp coat and bright buttons and cold, flat eyes. They’re afraid of the Empress’s right hand, her windup toy soldier trigger-man. They wouldn’t be curiously, eagerly watching for his reaction if they knew him as the snarling, savage sea monster you love to hate but he insists on relying on the scraps of power his something-reddish quadrantmate gives him. Coward. He idly sips his champagne as another seatroll, a plumblood with an unfortunately long nose, grabs his arm, whispering frantically in his earfin while staring at you. Your second gives the herald a rough shake as your crew mingles. The food serving platforms and catering carapaces are quickly overwhelmed . 

“ _Announce_ her, you idiot.” He squeaks, cringes, and gives a panicked little toot on his trumpet but manages to call out , “Her grace, the Marquise Spinneret Mindfang!” without stuttering. Your second plops him down on the balcony and pats his head gently before making her way down the stairs as your pretty prince steps out onto the dance floor. The dancers scuttle away like a shoal of bright fluttering reef fish before a shark. The host may be a pinker purple, but your Pretty has the power, secondhand from Her Infernal Constipation or not. 

He’s clearly annoyed at having to look up at you, but he can’t take his eyes off you. Your puffy sleeves, upswept hair and heavily brocaded bodice display your shoulders—and thus all his hate-bites—enticingly, and your black silk skirts are kilted up on one side to show a lot of cerulean petticoats and a _lot_ of leg. You’ve woven his teeth into your garter too. 

“My good host informs me that you don’t have an invitation, Marquise.” He looks faintly amused. How boring _is_ this party for someone to look forward to their known-for-flagrant-property-damage kismesis showing up? You intend to fix that. Someone needs to show these  bureaucrats how to have a good time. 

“Oh, but I do, Dualscar,” You decide to be gracious and address him by his slightly-more-publicly-respectable nickname, and vault over the railing. You land directly in front of him with a thud in a flare of bright skirts and manage not to break a heel on the twelve foot drop or step on your hems, because you’re incredible. “I told you I was going to gatecrash one of these silly parties of yours one day and you said, and I quote, ‘I wwwwould lovvvve to see you try.’” You smile brightly. “Invitation accepted.” 

He laces his fingers behind his back, and begins to circle you. Always with the circling thing. “I suppose it could be taken that way, yes. That said, it hardly seems like a party now that you’ve frightened off all the guests,” There’s an offended huff off to your left at the word “frightened”, but the force of a combined glare from both of you shuts the speaker up. He shrinks into his tacky fur collar and hides behind his champagne. (It’s white fur, like he’s trying to mimic your pretty bitefish, but not lusus-white, of course. Stupid.) 

“Also, your crew seems to have dismantled the musicians.” He’s looking to your right, where a good bit of your entourage has kicked all the little carapaces and their instruments off the music stage. You smile at him as they delog their own toys, drums and squeeze-boxes and flutes and a water-worn guitar. Your second takes one look at the silver-chased violin left by one frantic little white piece and swaps her own battered fiddle out in a trice. 

“Oh, no, you see, this is our party now. I  _brought_  the musicians.” 

His eyebrows shoot up into his stupid pompous pompadour as she draws a long, shivering note out of her new fiddle, then launches into a lively [reel ](http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=ZQJf0TwDjlg#Roundtable_Rival_-Lindsey_Stirling_HQ_%5Baudio%5D)and he… smiles? 

You shake off your confusion and tap your foot expectantly. “Well? You invited me here, aren’t you supposed to ask me to dance?” He takes your hand, bowing over it like a perfect courtier in an old vidgrub, kissing the back. He smiles with that sharp mocking edge you so rarely see in public, and scrapes his teeth sharply over your knuckle. Interesting. Then he’s lunging at you with one of those freakishly fast predatory motions—he still has your bloody hand held punishingly tight as he snatches you around the waist, pulls you close and tears you off your feet in a leaping, whirling quickstep down the length of the ballroom. 

You can’t help but laugh aloud in surprise—you would never have guessed he knew the steps to a gutterblood dockside-pub dance, and given the scandalized faces whizzing blurrily past you, neither would anyone else, not only that, but he’s _leading_. You let him, for now. He hasn’t stepped on your feet yet and besides, everyone knows the following partner has all the skill. You’ll do everything he does, but backwards in high heels and you get to do all the showy kicks. He spins you out when you reach the opposite side, making your skirts flare up over your thighs. You smirk at him as he pulls you back, sweeping back down the floor, around and around. 

“Dancing like bilgescum on shore leave!" you laugh. " So much for your reputation! ” He digs his claws into your side through your corset, but he laughs all the same. 

“When your moirail is as—”

“—grubshit insane?” You grin. 

He scowls thunderously, grinding the small bones in your hand together in his grip. “—eccentric as mine, you find yourself developin’ unusual skill sets. As to my ‘reputation’… My kismesis just gatecrashed the biggest, most affluent party a the season and turned it into a trashy, swashbucklin’ riot for scoundrels. You replaced the _band_. Everyfin’ went up in flames the second you showed up on that balcony. I figure I may as well give it a proper barbarian floatin’ funeral pyre.” 

You leap and double-click your heels on a turn, catching the skirt hem of some prissy blue-violet bint with a beehouse hairdo. Her shriek of outrage is satisfyingly shrill against the laughter of the crowd when it tears halfway off her bony frame. You kick the heavy fabric away as you complete the turn and nod sagely, holding back a wince at your aching hand.

“Very noble. Though I have to say, it’s a shame we’re the only ones dancing.” 

“True, but, this lot has enough sticks up their collective wastechutes to plant a forest, you won’t get any a them out here with the likes a you and your mates.” 

Your smile so wide it hurts, and let your sign flicker to life between your eyes. “I won’t, won’t I?” 

He looks scandalized, and yet oddly eager as you snap your head right and left on the next two turns. You force eye contact with as many people as you can, and the music seems to slow, deepening as you let your psionics creep into their minds. There’s a deep, percussive thud in the back of your thinkpan as your mental fangs sink in, one after another and the music abruptly picks up as four couples suddenly wheel out onto the floor. 

He barks out a delighted laugh, grinning fiercely at you. Motor-function control for eight people is relatively simple, even if he seems determined to make it more difficult by weaving in and out of them at random. You stretch your abilities a bit, force your new toys into a pattern-dance. Just a basic thiefbeasttrot, as your pan is already starting to itch behind your brightly burning sign and now there's eight pissed off and terrified voices in various shades of green and teal screaming into your thoughts. 

He pulls you into the center of the wheel, whirling you in a tight circle with complicated footwork and you focus hard, make everyone swing their partner’s legs into the air to throw him off but he follows easily—worse, he drops both hands to your waist and tosses you up, giving a little push-pull on your hips to spin you in the air. You hold tight to your control as he catches you and sweeps you down the side of the dance floor again. The blurry faces are a delicious mix of scandal, terror and hilarity and it’s almost worth the headache now stabbing between your eyes. He’s digging his claws through the back of your hand, between the bones, but your other one is nearly up to the first knuckle in his shoulder and he smells of pitch and sex. 

“More.”

“What?!” He's enjoying this? 

A trickle of violet sweat trails down his temple and he’s showing all his teeth in his smile. “Unless that’s too much for you…?” 

You bare your teeth at him defiantly and he spins you so hard your head snaps to the side. A few of your hairpins give up their attempt to restrain the luxurious cascade of your hair, but you like the sexy, tousled look and you aren’t quite sweating enough for it to stick to you. 

“There! The indigo. Do it!” 

If he thinks he’s challenging you with hemocaste he’s got it backwards, it’s not blood, it’s _willpower_ that stops you. Indigos are easy, especially a clown cultist like this one. All the miracle-contemplation leaves their minds hilariously open, but you squint a bit like it’s a strain to keep up the illusion, let him think he’s safe with his violet veins. The indigo’s turquoise girlfriend--matesprit?--is the hard one, but you pull her and the two blues next to them into the pattern as well for good measure. 

He picks out four more couples, all around the room. Jade with the lyre horns. Seadweller with the stupid hat. Blue dress, prosthetic leg. No, not the host, he gets to watch. Those two eggmates. Overmuscled blue guy in the strapless dress. The list goes on. Your head is throbbing, a massive piercing spike between your eyes, and you grit your teeth into a savage smile, because you can’t resist the challenge. His eyes light up when you near the music platform for the next countless time, and he snarls at your second to go faster. She looks at you questioningly and you laugh in response, _don’t stop, never stop_ , because his voice is rumbling deep from the center of his chest, a heady growl that goes right to your bulge, and his hair is coming undone too, black and violet tendrils curling over his forehead and there is no one in the crowd laughing now as the tempo spikes. 

“Green dress, branched horns, on your left.” 

You turn to take her over but he snaps you into another spin before you can make eye contact. 

“Don’t look.” 

“I—” 

“Y’don’ need to look to hold control, y’don’need to look to get it. Eyes on me. Do it.” 

“But—” You’re juggling _twenty two_ people, all screaming, all moving under your control and now you can’t even take them over properly? 

“What’re you goin’ ta do when I pop those pretty blue ganderbulbs out a your head, yeah? Best learn quick, dollface. Green dress. Branched horns. Noww.”  He growls, purrs, crushes your hand in his.

_Oh._

 You snarl, lock your eyes on his and push, working off the flash of memory. _There_. She’s yours. And her friend, who apparently also has a green dress and branched horns. Both at once. Twenty-four. You didn’t know you could _do_ that, and you feel a blood vessel burst in your sinuses with an additional stab of agony but somehow your overall control is fractionally easier. Your smile matches his as he swings you between the other dancers. You make them all spin their partner twice just to spite him and he laughs again. 

“That’s my girl.” 

You curl your fingers harder into his bleeding shoulder and _hiss_. 

Two groups of four are edging towards the staircase, breaking into a run when he notices them. He doesn’t even have to ask. The pain is indescribable. Could be an aneurysm, could be worse, and they tumble down the steps in their haste to get to the dance floor, one of them breaking his arm against the banister. Bone protrudes messily as he takes his partner’s hand, splattering great arcs of slick shining purple as he twirls him around. 

Thirty-two, and blood is pouring from your nose and one ear. You’ve now broken a personal record and you feel sick, reckless, beautiful, and you might be about to have a stroke. He’s crushing you against his body, your thighs and stomach pressed tight against his and you can feel precisely how much he's enjoying this. 

You abruptly realize that some of the screaming is actually outside your head now. Dozens are running for the doors, the stairs, the huge windows, the pair of you with weapons in claw and he’s looking down at you with the exquisite wild-eyed frenzy you do your damnedest to bring out in him. 

“Take them dowwn.” 

You can’t. You _can’t_. There’s too many, it hurts too much, he’s going to kill you. All that comes out is a strangled whine and he whips you out of the way of a descending axe without looking, without breaking eye contact, changing it into a double turn. 

“They’ll kill us both, darlin’, take ‘em dowwn, _take ‘em dowwn, damn you_.” He pulls you towards the center of the room, the center of your whirling, reeling trolls-turned-playthings, using them as moving shields, pressing your body all along his length, pushing his forehead against yours as he spins you both in a tight circle again and again. 

“Come on, _come on!_ " he growls, "Showw me wwhat you’vve got, _Mindfang_.” He never calls you Mindfang, and hearing it snarled out like that--thick and glottal with pitch and lust and possessive _pride_ —you’ll be damned if you let it be mockery and you have a very, very stupid idea you’ve always wanted to try. 

You can’t expand your control into any more bodies, but the bodies you already have can. You push outward, into your toys, out of yourself. You sag against him, falling limp as he continues the dance, the arm around your waist now holding you upright, toes of your boots dragging across the blood-slicked floor. 

Thirty-two heads roll to one side or another and distantly you hear yourself screaming as thirty-two spots of blue light flare bright as stars and _pulse_. 

Silence. 

Whiteout. 

You see everything snap into place, bright and clear. Shining light in concentric circles. Thirty-two becomes ninety-six, two hundred eighty-eight bright burning stars in your mind, laced together by your will and the music suddenly singing around you, a scintillating interconnected spiral with you at the heart of the web and you feel like a _god_. 

You’re all of them and none of them, their screams of terror and outrage in your head deafening and terrifying and musical all at once and you’re laughing madly, gleefully, as your head and shoulders loll sloppily back, your hair tumbling down to trail across the filthy polished stone. No sound comes from your mouth but from every mouth around you as they leap and whirl around you in their circles, an insane mandala of color and sound. Control is nothing. There is nothing to control because you’re in all of them, you are them. You intensify the pattern. One in eight leap into the air, one in sixteen twirl rapidly in place, a chain of twelve pairs interweaves between the circles at seeming random. 

He’s laughing with you, with all of you and your puppets smile viciously as he dances you to one corner of the room, where your host is huddled, gibbering. 

He dips you deeply, and your free arm falls from his bloody shoulder to hang above your head as he bows over your pliant body. He finally releases your other, mangled hand to dangle loosely as he sweeps his freed hand out like he’s presenting you to someone important, when there’s no one here but the sobbing mess of a seadweller on the floor, you, and nearly three hundred extended parts of your mind. 

_What was that about?_ It doesn’t come out of your mouth, but every other, and his smile turns smug as he hauls your body into some semblance of proper dance form, one hand--arm, really, as close as he's holding you--more or less on his shoulder, the other in his. He hitches you up by the hips until your head falls onto his shoulder again. You're idly pleased you manage to put a scratch across his chin with a horn even now. 

“ _That_ pathetic bastard is the one that had the audacity to question wwhy exactly I was lowwering myself so far as to take a ‘vvirtually unknown blueblood pirate’ as my kismesis. I felt a demonstration was in order.”

Hundreds of eyebrows quirk. _A demonstration of what? I just turned almost three hundred coldbloods into my playthings, and you think you can show me off like a prize oinkbeast and make you look good?_

Thousands of teeth shine bright in hundreds of snarling mouths. _I'm not like any other troll, Orphaner, I--_

 “Make me look good?"  He throws his head back, laughing like he’s about to choke.  "I invvite my kismesis to the party a the _season_ and she turns nearly three hundred coldblood nobles into her personal army a dancin’ meat puppets on a _wwhim_. It’ll take me swweeps to recovver my reputation, if I ever do. I may make the cullin’ lists for this, how’s that for irony? Here’s the fun part, bright-eyes: my reputation is gone. Burnt fields and salted ashes.  _Your_ reputation, howwevver…”

He’s twirling your body across the dance floor, around and around and over and over again. Switching hands, back to front, over and under his arms, spinning your body around his in quick, deft movements so you never stop moving, nearly collapsing a dozen times. You suddenly feel nauseated, and it’s not from dancing. 

He hauls you back into base position, your hand in his, his other on your waist holding you close as he smiles, black and terrible, into your empty eyes. 

“You say you're not like other trolls? I think you're right. I think you're _worse_." 

It rolls out on an evil, growling hiss through bared teeth and flared gills. He's come undone, beautiful and terrible, gods you hate him so. 

"And after tonight, darlin’, _evveryone_ wwill knoww your name.” 

Your horrified gasp echoes from your hundreds of throats as he leans in close and whispers the worst thing he possibly could into your ear. “You’re wwelcome.” 

No. No. No. No. No. NO. NO. **NO**. 

Sweeps and sweeps of planning, plotting, preparing. Everything you've ever worked for.  Scheming and clawing your way up from the bilges, slaughtering anyone that got in your way. Building your crew from the worst slime of the gutters with more full-scale mutinies than you care to count to an elite, competent fleet that can take down Imperial _warships_ in a matter of hours. Bribes and bets and bungled assassinations. You left a bloody rainbow wake in the seas behind your ship that only grew wider with time until seaside shantytowns paid you a fortune in wergild in hopes of staving off your ire, lest you raze them to the ground over and over again. Hunterrorists and laughsassins chased your ship down, cornered you in bars and died by the handful. Dozens of raids, hundreds of duels, thousands of kills. 

All your work, every iron in the fire--reduced to nothing. 

Because this… this is the kind of coup that will go down in history. 

He made you _stronger_ , you’ve never tried to control so many trolls, never would have tried if he hadn’t pushed you, never heard of anyone who _had_ tried. 

Windrider _damn_ him, he’s made you a legend. 

And he sacrificed _everything he had_ to do it, because he hates you so much, so deeply, that he wants to show the whole _world_ just how terrifying you can be. 

You shriek your perfect rage and it echoes through your toys, blowing out several windows. You bare your fangs and snap in his face even as your claws reach for his stomach, shredding through his waistcoat to the smooth-muscled flesh beneath and deeper still. Your mouth slicks over greasepaint as ropes of slippery turquoise slither into your hands to the floor and—

no no no no _no no no no no_

It’s all wrong. It’s all _wrong_. 

_ This isn’t your body.  _

The teal covers her—your—no— _her_ cultist matesprit’s face in harsh, tearing kisses, smearing your—his—ceremonial paints to oblivion. You—she—coughs blood into his—your—mouth as you—he—reaches farther up, tearing into her—your—airsacs. Gods above and below _you can feel her die_. 

You rake your claws down your pretty fish’s back through his jacket and, forcing them up to the knuckle between his gilless ribs. Blood pours down in a blue to match your own as shining moon-green spills from your throat and lips in bright pulsing waves. 

You can’t touch him. You can’t _find_ him. 

Two indigoes go down in a spray of snapping teeth and you feel the oily slick of bloodstained greasepaint on your tongue again before it’s washed away in a flood of bitter blue bile as a you sink your claws into a bared lilac stomach.

He’s right in front of you—behind you, leaping agilely over another fallen dancer, his cerulean partner a loose-limbed, vacant-eyed ragdoll in his arms— he’s three couples over on the left and you rake your claws across your scalp as you rip your shirt apart to tear with conical, blunt seawolf teeth at the flesh over your bloodpusher in a sea of ultramarine. 

You’re spread too far between too many people and he’s staring down at her—at you—with a horrified, frenzied anticipation, because with each death you die another part of the web collapses and you regain focus on him, _only_ him. Your vile, vicious, gorgeous _monster_ of a spade. 

Lavender splashes bright across your hands, up to the elbow. Dark indigo dribbles from your belly and mouth, choking you. Turquoise flesh in your teeth, sweet and sharp. Cobalt pours from your shattered nose You’re down to a handful of pets when he slips, falling to his knees in a pool of blue-green-violet-purple-teal and it’s finally you find him in the flawless pattern-dance of your bleeding, screaming, dying toys. You pull your few scattered selves into a tight ring around your prey and his partner, yourself. 

A wheel of four pairs with you in the heart again in the center of the ballroom and he’s beautiful. Wild-eyed and hungry and splattered in a cold-spectrum rainbow, every triangle sawblade tooth bared in a death’s head rictus like he wants to tear you to pieces, consume you utterly, perfect pitch bloodlust in his eyes, a shark in bloody waters, desperate and frenzied and deadly all for utter black hate of _you_. 

Eight pairs of hands close on their partner’s heads. Eight heads all turn to you, and are roughly turned away in a single, wrenching wet crackle. Eight dancers collapse to the floor, leaving only the two you. 

His hands drop from your waist to your thighs, lifting you into his lap as you shudder, your spine straightening as you come back to yourself. You lock your legs around his hips, your arms around his neck, and tear wildly at his mouth in deep, biting kisses that flood your mouth and his with salt cold true-violet like wine. Your claws slice into the nape of his neck and scalp as he shoves your petticoats up, tears at his belt and trousers until nothing remains between you. His bulge slithers into your nook, cool and slick and grounding, a thousand times more real than the voices-feelings-deaths echoing in your head. You brace your weight on his shoulders as he bites down hard on your thrusting tongue and he takes you there, kneeling amidst the howling, wailing, limp bodies of your broken, mangled toys and you moan desperately into his mouth because you knew, you _knew_ he had it in him, knew he could be the blight of your life and nothing, _nothing_ , will ever be such beautiful, terrible, pitch-black perfect torture as this night. 

 


	7. Dualscar ==> Be Insufferable Bloodstained Romantic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue to PartyCrashers

You have this well in hand. The security drones and subsequent investerrogators will find you sprawled half-naked across the music stage on your elbows, surrounded by somewhere around three hundred bodies in various stages of horrifically injured, catatonic, dying, or dead. You are drinking champagne directly from the bottle, you’re covered in blood of just about every shade on the cold spectrum and while your hair is in fact slicked impeccably back, it’s not with product. It’s probably blood but no one wants to ask. Frankly they should just be happy you managed to get your trousers back on.

This was a considerable challenge, and also your alibi. Why didn’t you stop her from escaping? Because your glubbing legs are glubbing paralyzed. Temporarily, of course, but they don’t know that yet. It’s become something of a routine, ever since she stopped hocking your presents. 

Now she just leaves them hanging off some piece of wreckage in her wake as a calling card, occasionally an actual calling card with coordinates in some ridiculous cypher you’re fairly certain is based off random rolls of dice. If you solve it in time you might catch her, and she’ll leave burning bite marks up the inside of your thighs to match the lacework of scars across her shoulders.

She might be making it easy on you. You’ve caught and held her so many times her venom doesn’t burn so much. You’re actually developing immunity; each kiss is an inoculation and a hit of some pitch-burning drug you can’t describe. Can’t find anywhere else.

She won’t wear your jewels, or your colors, but she’ll wear your teeth around her neck like trophies, and flaunts the savage artwork you’ve torn into her shoulders like it’s more precious to her than anything in the world.   
You dangle the necklace she threw at you from your claws, watching the huge, water-clear sapphire sparkle. It’s the same teardrop sapphire she stole from you the day you met, but significantly altered. She had a notch cut into the bottom curve of the teardrop, and the fragment reattached with a rough blob of what appears to be hull solder to make a crude, misshapen spade. It’s an ugly, brutish piece, a shameless mistreatment of a beautiful antique, and it’s absolutely perfect. 

You’re slowly starting to realize she owns you as much as She does.


	8. Her Imperious Condescension ==> Get What You Want

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kismessitude is fun, but he is _yours_. And it's aboat time he remembered that. (For you, Anon!)

     “You are so glubbin pretty pike this.”

His hands don’t stop their ministrations, though his eyes flicker up to look at you through stupidly long lashes. The tips of his earfins rise slightly, and you hide a snicker at the mental image of a baby barkbeast receiving praise. He probably thinks—hopes—you mean his physical aesthetic. You don’t, but you’re not glubbin’ _blind_.

He does make pretty picture. A study in contrasts, all tall shiny black boots and tight death-white trousers with a shimmer to them suggesting they were once part of someone’s fishmom. Past that, he’s bare chested as a dockworker, his pretty silks and satins scattered on the floor before your throne like shells after the tide. Razorblade cheekbones, sculpted brows, long clean lines of muscle—marred by those _glubbing_ scars. A high-violet prince on his knees whose elegantly webbed hands knead the soles of your feet with the ease of long practice. You cock your head to one side, prop your cheek on your hand, watching him.

     “It scares them, minnow.”

He looks up this time. You smile softly, a faint little smirk at the corners of your mouth, and your eyes flick briefly over his shoulder to the guards at the door. He ignores them and quirks his unscarred eyebrow skeptically. The guards fidget under your gaze, pretend to ignore him and pretend to ignore your little games and pretend there isn’t a massive flurry of bribery for watch duty every time he’s in here with you.

     “Think aboat it. Their wigglerhood nightmare, the terror of the seas—The Orphaner—on his knees like some pathetic glubbin’ rustblood. Giving flipper massages, no less.”

You wiggle your toes, deliberately leaving off the lowblood-given second half of his title. “It upsets the natural order of things.” He snorts dismissively. “They have it backwards,” he rumbles, pressing his thumbs slowly, rhythmically, down from your arch to heel. It’s a nice speaking voice, you suppose. Smooth and deep and resonant. His singing voice is nicer, but neither is quite the voice you’re looking to draw out of him.

     “They don’t grasp the honor of serving you, let alone being in your presence, of even looking upon you, Empress.” The last word comes out on a purr. Better. “Perhaps, if they were even half so devoted as I…”

His hands move to your ankle, and his head dips to press a kiss to your instep. Soft and gentle but _bold_ , unusually daring of him. A streak of gold-dusted oil from your toe arcs over his cheek as he gazes up through those truly ridiculous lashes. It is _so_ unfair that they’re real.

     “…they could be so honored as to touch you.”

     “'Devoted?'”

He freezes at the sneer in your voice, antlerbeast in the vehicular illumination devices. Even his hands stop, leaving your foot in the general vicinity of his throat. You could tear his windpipe out with a kick, leave the upper gill filaments dangling in wine-dark dripping threads down his chest while he clutches, choking, at the ruined tissue. You could watch him helplessly suck air through nose, mouth, throat and shredded opercula, mindlessly drawing fluid into his lungs, wheezing it out his thoracic gills in a shining violet mist that drips down your legs, your throne. You sit up, claws curling around the richly enameled armrests.

     “Your _devotion_ leaves your fronds stained with the blood of countless lusii.” You lean forward slowly as you speak, and his pretty purple eyes show a ring of bright gold sclera all around the iris in fear of you — worse, of displeasing you. You curl your upper lip in a snarl; catch the guards shifting uneasily in the corner of your eye.

     “And not just lusii, but trolls. Traitors. Fools. Rebels. Juveniles. Wrigglers. _Hatchlings_.” You hiss the last, watch him swallow nervously. A bit of inlay audibly _cracks_ under your claws. “You’ve made the seas run rainbow-dark with conquest. Swept through the culling fields like a storm. There is a trail of broken bodies, whole shipwrecks, behind you that spans the galaxy.”

You’re bent double now, in his face, invasive—intimate—inexorable. His eyes dart frantically over yours. He doesn’t move, doesn’t _breathe_.

     “If that’s the devotion I want…”

His eyes somehow snap wider as you cup his face in your palm. You cock your head again; stroke your thumb through the oil on his cheekbone, smearing it.

     “…Who could ebber hope to conchpare?” You lilt, smiling sweetly. He loves your smile.

All the air comes out in a rush, actually whistling out his thoracic gills hard enough to make your skirts flutter. Relief leaves him limp in your hand. He flinches ever so slightly when you take your foot out of his grasp, relaxes when you brace it on his bare shoulder. He brings his hands to your calf, making long, slow strokes up and down the muscle, kneading the roots of your fin. He purrs shamelessly into your palm, his eyes fluttering half-closed as you shift your position, extending your free leg between his thighs. You settle back into the cushions and suppress another snicker as he leans with you, unwilling to break contact. This is not helping the baby-barkbeast impression, and pushes the knee he's holding up and back into an...interesting position.

He doesn’t even notice that no wetsuit for purposes of finrubs means nothing _else_ beneath your skirts—he’s too lost in pheromones—until said skirts rustle and slither up your thigh. You hold your faint smile as his eyelashes flutter again, pupils blown wide and blissed out. He glances down in vague confusion at the sound, then abruptly up and _oh_ it is too bad the guards are behind him, that blush is priceless.

     “Others may serve me, but… devoted? No… Not pike my Orphaner…” He leans farther into your hand at his title and _hello_ … that is quite the active bulge moving against your shin, isn’t it? He tenses, fear flickering in his eyes again. Hmm. Apparently you weren’t supposed to notice that, but you always notice. You know that he knows that you always know and you both pretend to ignore it. Is it the peepshow or the fear or the flushed-pale petting that gets him going? Probably a mix. Kinky boy. You stroke your other hand through the sleek short hair at the side of his head, not approval, not encouragement, but not denial either. The back of your knuckles brush along the top tine of his earfin and he _shudders_.

     “They fight for me…” you punctuate the phrase with a subtle flex of your thigh. Just enough to push your shin against him a bit. His pupils are dilated so wide you wonder if he can even see you.

     “Bleed for me…” Another flex and he _trills_ , high and sweet as he abruptly turns his head, presses a kiss to your palm, eyes closed, brow furrowed and gasping for air.

     “ _Die_ for me…” You hook your raised heel over his shoulder and pull. His hands snap down to the edge of your seat, catching him before he can land face-first in your nook, and his head falls forward on a low moan. His body is pushed harder against you by your heel along his spine, and your shinbone traps his bulge along the sharp vee of muscle at his hip. You slip a claw under his chin, lift his head.

You let up the pressure on his back slightly, but leave your knee hooked over his shoulder as you trail gentle clawtips along his jaw. His breath is coming in short, sharp pants out his gills that ruffle your crumpled skirts and he’s locked his elbows in a fruitless attempt to stop trembling.

     “But you…” You put the barest edge of a purr into your voice, and smile with all your teeth. “You _cull_ for me…”

The effect is instantaneous. He _whines_ desperately, grinds his hips against you—just once—but it’s a slow, sensuous, sinuous motion from neck to knees that rolls down his body like a wave. Presumably it made the long, sleek muscles of his back ripple enticingly, because one of the guards you’ve told him—taught him— _trained_ him to ignore just let out an appreciative, if quickly suppressed, moan. Your smile twists up smugly. They couldn’t _pay_ for porn this good.

You curl your hand around the back of his neck, play with the short soft hair there. You could move your hands slightly, cup his skull in one hand, his chin in the other and wrench his head around with a wet, grinding crunch, tear it free from his shoulders in a spray of snapped tendons and severed veins. You could raise it level with yours, watch his eyes fade to grey—it’s true they stay conscious for a bit—as his body collapses into your lap, his bloodpusher sending frantic bursts of fluid gushing out the stump, coating your stomach, your legs, your throne in violent violet. You trail your fingertips down the ridges of his upper gills.

     “You would cull anyfin for me, wouldn’t you?”

He opens his eyes. “Evverythin’.” _There_ is that desperate rasp you love. This face is almost better than that blush. Hunted, haunted, _hungry_.

     “Anemonyone?” You let your smile color your voice, a light little trill, reaching back up to smooth the longer, slicked-back hair between his horns down just the way you like it.

     “ _Evveryone_.” Part of his bulge has actually managed to writhe out the top of his trousers, a sticky twitching tendril curled lightly around your ankle. You lean closer, your parted lips brushing his cheek—half a caress, almost a kiss and another shudder wracks him, his bulge winding around your calf until its frills tickle your fins.

     “Even her…?” You purr into his earfin. He starts, and actually pulls back slightly to look at you, confused. You eye him through your lashes, pout a bit for effect.

     “Your little beach seems to have massacred something pike three hundred of my courtiers at the Ganima party last perigree and is causing quite a stir down the eastern seaboard. I don’t pike it. You’ve had enough playtime with your spadescrush.”

He tenses, almost frowns at “spadescrush”. Surprise, surprise. Well, he did lure her into that party with the intent to make her infamous. Maybe she is the hate of his life…

Even better.

He opens his mouth as if to protest, but a delicate shift of your weight has the arch of your foot pressed against his nook and turns whatever he was thinking into a strangled groan with his eyes rolling back in his head.

     “Shhhhh… What do you need her for?” You run a clawtip down the crooked curve of one horn with the hand not holding him up.

     “Ain’t I your… well, your everyfin?” You cock your foot, pushing hard against his nook and

He

Is

_Gone_

Silent but for a series of harsh, clicking grunts deep in his throat and the wet splatter of fluid; slack-jawed and shuddering and those pants are _so_ ruined. You let him press his temple against yours, shooshing him quietly, supporting him with the hand at his neck until he figures out how to breathe again. His elbows give out slowly and he slides bonelessly down, leaving streaks of violet down your legs, your throne. You leave your foot on his shoulder and he rests his head against your opposite, sticky shin. A smudge of violet joins the gold sparkles on his cheek as he gazes up at you adoringly, reverently, _guiltily_. You doubt he notices the stain, particularly with your hand still in his hair.

You decide not to tell him.

He struggles into a half-sitting position, groping along the floor with one shaking hand, his forehead pushed against your knee, until he snags his overshirt. The finely woven linen turns out to be excellent for cleaning fluid off your legs and you grin delightedly. You didn’t even _hint_ at a mess and here he is gently wiping your legs down with something like a teal’s half-sweep stipend in fabric form. You resolve to have clean clothes brought in for him. You’ve made him walk out of your throne room, your council chamber, your garden with violently prehensile, soaked (but, of course, tacitly ignored) trousers before, but he did put on a good show for your audience—you haven’t decided if you’ll have them culled for watching or not, yet— and there’s fluid seeping through the leather all the way down to his _knees_. That’s a bit much. You’re feeling magnanimous. He’s being _such_ a good boy. And to think your councellarcenists were worried after his silly little party trick. Kismessitude is fun and all but he is your Orphaner. _Yours_ … and he’s nodding slowly against your knee, slumped like a dead troll against your legs, your throne.

The little blue bitch will be dead within half a perigree.

**Author's Note:**

> My Dualscar uses Eridan's quirk/wwobbly accent because Cronus' is _insufferable_ and I can't stand it.


End file.
